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Mad Cows (15)

MAD? This irksome Kathy Lette adaptation is positively schizophrenic.

In snapping at the heels of Anna Friel's Aussie single mum, Sara Sugarman's caper darts between '30s screwball, '90s girl-power cliches and '60s kitchen-sink without showing sensitivity for any era or affinity for any genre.

Imagine Ken Loach's Poor Cow remade as a Benny Hill skit and you're halfway to catching its garbled, mongrel pedigree.

The plot, too, is just a panting circuit of half-baked incidents. Friel's spunky heroine gets dumped by her caddish lover (Greg Wise) and winds up in jail, where her baby is sneaked away from her by a witch-like psychotherapist (Anna Massey). Help, though, is at hand in the angular form of her louche best mate (Joanna Lumley in Ab Fab mode) and a kindly aristocrat (Phyllida Law).

Meanwhile, a crop of look-at-me cameos (assorted supermodels, Meg Matthews, Mohammed al-Fayed as a Harrod's doorman) jostle for position against a tourist-brochure London backdrop.

Truth be told, Friel bears up well in what effectively amounts to her first starring role - a vivid, vital presence with a convincing Aussie accent to boot.

It's just that the rest of the film gives her scant room to manouvre, no scope to conjure her cartoony character into some semblance of life.

Instead, Mad Cows runs on a diet of crash zooms and lots of slapstick running about. It hyperventilates when it should be drawing deeper breaths. It floors the accelerator but never really gets beyond second gear.

That said, the film's real problem turns out to be Lette's source material.

Anchored by a trite all-men-are-bastards ethos, Mad Cows offers little more than a selection box of well-thumbed one-liners.

"The only thing supporting a single mother is her Wonder Bra," quips Lumley. "I think I've got a sign on my heart saying, 'In case of emergency, break'," snaps Friel.

Sure, Lette's trademark zingers might read nice in a magazine article but, as film dialogue, they suck to high heaven.

People don't talk the way Lette makes them talk. Hers is the language of novelty T-shirts, bumper-stickers and coffee mugs. Read aloud, it rings as false as a wooden nickel.

Xan Brooks

Copyright 1999
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