I'll watch anything that Brian Cox is in, which is how we came to view this cliched, platitudinous collection of hackneyed scenes that calls itself a film. It's shot well and has a great cast - Thora Birch, Peter Coyote, Rosanna Arquette and numerous others in support of the great man Cox as cantankerous old Scottish crofter Rory; JJ Feild playing his doe-eyed son Ian. Rory is an Outer Hebridean as reimagined by and viewed through a Hollywood lens - gruff and unforgiving, on first impression but soon the whole of San Francisco is in thrall to his magical, twinkly-eyed wisdom and truth telling. There's a smidgeon of enjoyment to be garnered from watching this fine cast do their thing, but the script is just a series of hoary old cliches strung together one after the other, so our chief enjoyment sprang from predicting what the next rose-tinged moment pressed forth from the cookie-cutter plot machine would be. The good cinematography and production values ratchet it up a notch beyond yer average Hallmark TV movie, to which vapid feelgood "family values" genre this movie most definitely belongs. Cox, and the entire cast, are better than this watery, dire, predictable stuff, but we all gotta pay the rent, eh?
Review of The Etruscan Smile
