Best to cut and run

filmoftheweek Craig Ferguson plays Glasgow hairdresser Crawford MacKenzie, Scotland's finest hair stylis in this hit-and-miss comedyt. The self-confessed "Red Adair of hair", he's the man the women of Glasgow call upon to salvage botched perms and unseemly split ends. So confident is Crawford of his abilities that when he receives an invitaion to the prestigious Hairdressers' Freestyle Competition in Los Angeles, he naturally assumes he's being asked along to compete and not simply to spectate, which, on reaching LA, he discovers is all his invitation entitles him to do.

Director Kevin Allen's film follows Crawford as he hooks up with Hollywood agent Candy Harper (Frances Fisher) and tries to win a place on the competition in mock documentary fashion. It's all very This Is Spinal Tap, only this time with pampered narcissistic hairdressers in place of pampered narcissistic rock stars. But while Tap's send up of fly-on-the-wall conventions managed to be fresh and inventive when it was made some 15 years ago, The Big Tease's mockumentary style seems laboured and stale.

The gags involving the unseen documentary cameraman filming Crawford are predictable, such as them falling over or their prolonged struggle to fit inside a lift. Chris Langham's performance as the bumbling Nick Broomfield-style director orchestrating the whole thing is occasionally funny, but nowhere near as effortlessly amusing as Broomfield himself, which makes you question the point of the parody.

The hand-held, rough-and-ready shooting style makes for some pretty shoddy-looking scenes, too, most notably an ineptly cobbled together montage sequence depicting Crawford's night out in a swanky LA club.

All this is a shame because in his last film, Twin Town, Allen proved himself to be a visual stylist capable of a bit of flair. At the very least, he should have let loose in The Big Tease's climatic moment - the outrageously kitsch competition, where Crawford shows off his specially-created hairstyle to a panel of judges and an audience of his peers. It's a sequence gagging for Simply Ballroom- style panache and glamour (Crawford's creation, The Flower of Scotland is a thistle-shaped blue-rinsed beehive from which appears a pirouetting doll dressed in a kilt), but in Allen's hands, the scene is flat and uninteresting as a Monday morning school assembly.

The film's swipes at the superficiality of life in southern California aren't much better either. With jokes about the impossibility of getting appointments at exclusive Bel Air hairdressers, pretentious waiters and a predictable, albeit very funny excursion into South Central, Allen's understanding of LA seems to have been entirely taken from Steve Martin movies.

However, the satire is fairly weak. Like the admiring Crawford, one suspects that Allen, with an eye on future career developments, perhaps, is a little in awe of life in Hollywood - witness the respect meted out to David Hasselhoff (whom the star-struck Crawford stumbles across), in what surely must rank as the best guest appearance by a B-list celebrity since Fergie popped up in Friends.

But if The Big Tease is worth watching it's because of the unforced amiability of its star, Craig Ferguson. This Scottish comic is already something of a celebrity in the States, where he co-stars in the popular TV comedy The Drew Carey Show, and his spirited turn as Crawford is likely to win him more fans. And for every dud line uttered - and there are plenty of those - there are some real-laugh- out-loud moments (warned that a car he wants to buy drinks petrol by the gallon, Ferguson responds "So do some of my friends in Glasgow").

Admittedly, with innumerable references to Braveheart and Sean Connery, Ferguson lays on his fish-out-of-water Scottishness a bit thick, and you'd think the famously unfazed residents of LA wouldn't really be as fussed by Ferguson's presence (charming though he is) as they're shown to be here. But one thing's certain - as Scotland's very own cultural ambassador in Hollywood, Ferguson's Crawford Mackenzie wins over Mike Myer's Fat Bastard any day.

Edward Lawrenson l See Magazine: Page 6

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