Fast Romance

Eight characters all alike have very little dignity in fair Weegieland; their post-speeddate mingling provides the impetus for a remarkably thin plot, as they witter their lives away in a deeply derivative string of spew-inducing Inciting Incidents and plot contrivances aiming for the weakest in rom and com.

Carter Ferguson directs with what could charitably be described as a loose style. He brings together the actors with all the force of a small youth theatre workshop, and they bounce off one another weakly. Only Derek Munn and Lesley Hart (as a sympathetic post-office middle manager who keeps many secrets from his co-workers, and an upcoming-bride with tepid feet respectively) emerge with their dignity intact. The rest of the cast seem drawn from Scottish central casting, the women are especially weakly developed - a shower of halfwits, harlots and howling nosey mothers. Barbera Rafferty embraces her inner evil vampish OAP and camps things up to the level required.

The script is a strange concoction, drawing direct comparisons with Love, Actually - Fast Romance occasionally deals in family melodrama. It actually pulls far more punches than Curtis' nougat-hearted simpering pleasure - and pointlessly namechecks the great Scottish classics Gregory's Girl and Trainspotting. The screenwriting is trite: lacking in wit, charm, pleasure or anything resembling a good yarn.

Onscreen, it's uneven, desperately uninvolving and overlong at 90 minutes, with an even stranger soundtrack selection. Heaven only knows where it could be marketed. It's almost certainly not coming to a cinema near you.