BRASSED OFF (49)

Directed by: Mark Herman

Starring: Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald, Ewan McGregor

The Pitch: Coal-miners in the North of England face unemployment and penury ; only the colliery's brass band - and the chance of becoming national champions - can reclaim their lost pride.

Theo Sez: A poor man's FULL MONTY, at least if the poor man in question were also a fiery (and rather strident) political activist. As in MONTY, the combination of feelgood music and earthy Northern humour plays very effectively off the grim, depressed settings, but the mix of light and dark isn't as well-judged here : sentimentality is allowed to get out of hand, most cloyingly when the entire brass band gathers for a rendition of "Danny Boy" outside the hospital where its leader (named - yes! - Danny) is dying of tuberculosis. In a way it's inevitable - for the film is infinitely angrier than the rather rueful MONTY, much more emotional about the plight of its miners : in the final stages especially it tends to bury its human element beneath an avalanche of admirable but excessive left-wing rhetoric (it even ends with a caption reading "Since 1984 there have been 140 pit-closures in the UK" - while the band plays "Land of Hope and Glory"!). It feels oddly irrelevant in the current British movie climate, a relic from a more polemical age ; more damagingly, the special pleading makes for some embarrassingly crude scenes - when one of the miners (wearing a clown costume, for added pathos) launches into a rant against divine injustice ("You took John Lennon - and Margaret bloody Thatcher lives!"), you never saw a worse movie in your life. Still, better to be passionate than wishy-washy : the gentle comic stuff is by far the best of it - but you have to respect its rage.