For a romantic story to work on film, you have to believe, perhaps naively, that the characters up on the screen genuinely are falling in love. For a sport story to work on film, you have to believe that the characters up on the screen are really engaging in whatever game they are supposed to be playing. In the tennis-themed romantic-comedy "Wimbledon", the romance is just as convincing as the athletics - and that's not meant as a compliment.

The ever-excellent Paul Bettany stars as Peter Colt, an over-the-hill tennis player (ranked 119th and regularly getting whipped by younger, better athletes) who somehow jammily gets handed a wild-card spot at Wimbledon. Assuming that he will get knocked out early (he is already planning the match to be the last before he retires), he arrives at the tournament and has a meeting with sexy American star player Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst) when he accidentally winds up in her hotel and catches her in the shower. Since this is a 12a certificate romance, this is one of those showers that has a glass door which magically steams directly over the more interesting aspects of her body. Despite seeing less than he would in a normal bathroom, Peter is instantly besotted - and is thrilled to discover that Lizzie fancies him rotten too. After a night of fish & chips and apparent (unseen) sexual bliss, he goes out and unexpectedly wins his match.

As both the tournament and the relationship progress, Peter finds himself going much further than expected and he appears to have a shot at becoming that rarest of creatures - a British male player who might actually win the men's singles title at Wimbledon. Along the way come the standard roadblocks - an ageing body, nasty opponents, ravenous paparazzi (though they conveniently disappear so that Peter and Lizzie can meander around London whenever director Richard Loncraine requires an interlude to pad things out) and, worst of all, Lizzie's overprotective dad (Sam Neill, with an American accent that needs to be heard to be disbelieved), who doesn't want her to become
distracted from winning her own championship and fears that by falling for Peter, she runs the risk of a "mushy" opening serve (to say the least).

The producers of "Wimbledon" are also responsible for such films as "Four Weddings and a Funeral", "Notting Hill", "Love Actually" and the Bridget Jones saga and this effort sticks resolutely to the tiresomely predictable template formula set by them. There is an adorably abashed British guy, an adorably feisty American girl, wacky friends and relatives, wacky cameos, a soundtrack dominated by duff and seriously dated AOR tunes (e.g. David Gray's "This Year's Love" - come on!!) and a scene where the lovers spat for no other reason than to provide the set-up for the final scene where they can reconcile in the most public way possible. Sometimes the formula works (as it almost did in "Love Actually") but in the case of "Wimbledon", everything is so rote and predictable that is impossible to really work up any sort of rooting interest.

Part of the problem is that Bettany and Dunst (whose part is actually smaller and less significant than the ads would have you believe) strike zero sparks together. Both have been good in other films but here, they don't seem to have the slightest interest in each other. Sexual tension, competitive edge - any of the things that you would expect in a film like this - are utterly absent here; the two are as colourless as the outfits they sport on the poster. (Perhaps sensing a vacuum, all of the supporting players try to compensate by going wildly over-the-top.)

Another problem with Bettany and Dunst is that they simply are not believeable as tennis players. I don't claim to be an expert on the sport but even I can tell that Bettany looks less like a supreme world-class athlete and more like a fairly fit and agile guy who simply watches sport in a bar while puffing a smoke. As for Dunst, she looks too small and dainty to be a renowned player - most female tennis players today are ripped to the point where they look like they could simply kick the crap out of anyone who crosses them. The publicity materials brag about all the time that the two spent training with the likes of ex-pro Pat Cash but you wouldn't know it from the film because Loncraine shoots the various matches in such an off-putting matter (full of CGI tricks and quick edits) that they never feel like a real game is going on. No balls were used in the making of this film - and, relax, I'll resist the play on words. For such a scene to be believeable, it has to be shot with as few augmentations as possible and the more tricks and cuts that are added, the less effective it becomes. Perhaps Loncraine was trying to keep the non-tennis audience from growing bored but a good film would still be able to hold interest even if the sport wasn't particularly familiar.

"Wimbledon" isn't an especially awful film - it has been nicely shot by the great Darius Khondji and it moves quickly enough - it is just a pointless one. There is no drama in the story (the whole thing is essentially about a guy who gets to compete for the championship at Wimbledon and nail Kirsten Dunst, both of which he achieves with relatively little difficulty) and no compelling romance and precious little humour.

It's obvious Bettany's inherent talent massively outweighs the material - he is such an accomplished actor ("Gangster No. 1" is total confirmation of this) and he may well look back one day at this in blushing horror. The best that can be said about the film is that it is slightly better than "Players", the legendary tennis-oriented bomb with Dean Paul Martin, Ali McGraw and Pancho Gonzalez. The worst thing is that it isn't that much better.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Screenplay by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, Emily Watson, John Lithgow, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Vaughan, Stephen Fry, Stanley Tucci, Sonia Aquino, Heidi Klum, Nigel Havers, Mackenzie Crook

"The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" is an adventurously conceived biopic of the late comic actor that, unfortunately in the end, doesn't quite convince. Geoffrey Rush gives a tremendous performance however in the title role of a man portrayed as a brilliant mimic and chameleon but a first-class bastard at times, who brought little but grief to his intimate family, friends and business relationships. This HBO/BBC film collaboration sustains interest most of the way, but the combination of an unsympathetic central figure and a patchy recreation of events involving numerous famous people makes for an ambitiously told life story that finally doesn't cut it in a production that might look a lot better on the small screen.

Inspired by Roger Lewis' Sellers biography, which incidentally goes uncredited onscreen, the script by first-timers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely takes an unconventional approach, focussing on the subject's bad behaviour toward his colleagues and supposed loved ones and having Sellers periodically take on other people's personalities so he can comment on his own actions.

This strategy is intriguing and the film cannot be accused of lacking a strong view of the man it examines, but after clearly laying out its thesis early on - that Sellers was far more comfortable in the disguise offered by his many fictional characters than he was in his own skin, and that in personal relations he could always be counted upon to be selfish, abusive and unreliable - the remainder of the story consists largely of repeated confirmations of these dominant traits.

Furthermore, director Stephen Hopkins, possibly misapplying habits he picked up on the TV series "24," keeps the camera bobbing about in jittery fashion most of the time, to annoying effect that feels far too contemporary, as well as inappropriate to the period and fashion of filmmaking with which Sellers is associated. When Hopkins is finally forced to nail his camera down to recreate scenes from "Dr. Strangelove," the sense of stability comes as a huge relief, but unfortunately it doesn't last long.

A sense that something is off begins with the opening credits. It was a fine idea to illustrate them with fanciful animation in the "Pink Panther"/"Casino Royale" fashion with Tom Jones singing "What's New Pussycat?" on the soundtrack. But the pseudo-pop/psychedelic results aren't especially stylish. It's the same story all the way through; one feels the filmmakers are on the right track, but the execution just isn't sharp enough. Partly, the problem is endemic to this sort of project, a life story filled with people whose screen images are fixed in the public mind. It's also an issue, however, of not completely realising the project's potential, of not pushing relentlessly until the all-important details about the origins of Sellers' attitude are firmly achieved.

The story starts in 1957, with Sellers initial burst of fame on BBC radio's wildly popular "The Goon Show." Screen roles and stardom soon followed for this ordinary looking bespectacled man in his mid-30s who had a pushy, hovering mum (a fine Miriam Margolyes), retiring dad (a criminallly under-used Peter Vaughan), supportive wife Anne (Emily Watson) and two delightful children.

As presented here, things begin to change when Sellers, in the early '60s, stars in a picture opposite Sophia Loren (the amply statuesque Sonia Aquino). The Italian bombshell turns him inside out, all the more so for not sleeping with him despite his desperate efforts. All the same, Sellers callously tells his wife and young children that he loves Sophia more than he does them, then promptly has a sexual session in the back of a car with Sophia's stand-in, all of which prompts the crack-up of his marriage. Whatever the actual truth of this episode may be, the "affair" is presented as a figment of Sellers' imagination that assumed greater importance than the feelings of his family, something the actor comments upon when he assumes the physical guise of Anne.

Some of Sellers' well known quirks - his obsessive home movie shooting, fancy cars, interest in fortune telling and avoidance of "bad luck" colours - are layered in, and the action, along with his life, picks up when he reluctantly replaces Peter Ustinov in "The Pink Panther," his first big American movie. Good comic mileage comes of Sellers' trying out his Inspector Clouseau accent on the flight to film the picture in Rome, and Rush's sublime re-enactment of one classic scene is bang on target.

The recreation of a key scene from "Dr. Strangelove" reveals what that film would have looked like in colour, and while buffs will pick up on the import of a scene in which Sellers, insisting that three roles are enough, complains that he can't figure out how to perform the fourth (the bomb-riding cowboy eventually played by Slim Pickens), Stanley Tucci doesn't do much with his turn as Kubrick, not even trying to replicate the director's pronounced Bronx accent.

The film really hits its stride depicting the actor's relationship with his second wife, blonde knockout Britt Ekland (vivaciously played by Charlize Theron). Behaving like an eager schoolboy around her and practically doing cartwheels in a frantic effort to keep her amused, Sellers manages to win Ekland's affections and mentions more than once how "phenomenal" she is in bed. But apparently she was a little too phenomenal, as Sellers suffers a heart attack that leaves him technically dead for more than a minute before he's revived.

A very funny scene has Ekland telling her husband she's pregnant while he's having a 'sit-down' in the toilet. But it all goes downhill fast after the baby's born and the couple work together on a film as Sellers turns on her with utterly unmotivated verbal and physical abuse. This Ekland section excels not only because of the intensity of the drama involved but because it presents the entire arc of a relationship, something completely absent elsewhere. For Sellers and the film, it's mostly downhill from here, as he reluctantly agrees to resurrect Clouseau for the money while awaiting the chance to do his dream project, "Being There," about a man with no personality. Ignoring Sellers' third and fourth marriages entirely and showing him ageing very quickly, the last stretch does provide a vivid picture of the actor's increasingly unpleasant love-hate relationship with director Blake Edwards, who's given an energetic, slightly vulgar reading by John Lithgow, a man far taller and bulkier than the genuine article.

Not long after finally realising "Being There" with a career-crowning performance (see Forgotten Classics elsewhere on Media Eye Film), Sellers died, in 1980, at only 54. Ultimately, it's a very sad story, with final credits providing such off-putting information that he left his children only $2000 apiece.

What emerges is a portrait of a tortured genius so deeply immersed into his characters that he virtually disappeared - a man so obsessed with his identity that he found it impossible to relate to those around him. Something the film never captures is the childlike joy he conveyed in his films; the brilliant comedy we all saw is here shown as merely a ruthless drive to work.

Dead Man's Shoes

Directed by: Shane Meadows
Written By Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine
Cast: Paddy Considine, Gary Stretch, Toby Kebbell, Emily Aston, Neil Bell

Shane Meadows shrugs off the wry, bittersweet working class attitude of his previous films such as '24/7' and 'Once Upon A Time In The Midlands' and replaces it with a much more savage account of the mores of modern Britain in "Dead Man's Shoes", an austere look at small town revenge.

The happy-go-lucky locals grinding through life in Meadows early work have now mutated into sadistic sociopaths and tortured souls driven to the ends of desperation, as the director gets to grips with his dark side. This manifests itself most intensely in Richard (Paddy Considine) the film's vitriol-fuelled protagonist who makes it his life's work to root out and wreak vengeance upon the gang of local chem-head deadbeats who destroyed his brother's life.

A former soldier, Richard swoops down upon the sleepy peak district town of his birth from a deserted hilltop farmhouse. His combat skills demonstrably intact, Richard instead hones the sharpest tool in his arsenal, hatred, in a gut-clenching internal struggle with the demons of his past. His absence in his brother's hour of need is the spectre of regret that fuels a one-man spree of violence, against all the town's petty thugs and drug-dealers. Richard's cause is propelled by his inability to reconcile what happened whilst the villains still prosper as opposed to a desire to make things better. He';s doing good but for all the wrong reasons, and as a result he's also made to suffer.

A cold and gloomy reworking of a familiar theme, still good for some dramatic mileage, Dead Man's Shoes certainly makes an impact in mood more than story. Plot-wise it's threadbare, little more than a series of violent outbursts as the strong, silent (and deadly) Richard does his dirty work in a gas mask and combat jacket. It's really in the almost supernatural feel of the setting (deepest, dankest Derbyshire, eerily captured) and through Considine's passive-aggressive powerhouse of a performance that the film effectively rears up. The film explores motive from an existential point of view during the quiet periods Richard spends alone in the wilderness. As he executes his bloody revenge, he's shown searching for reason and resolution in an effort to find a spiritual counter-weight. Considine, who co-wrote the script, manages to convey this maelstrom of internal conflict with a razor-raw edge; his agitation festers like a wound that won't close.

Deliverance, Straw Dogs and First Blood are amongst the films that point the way towards Dead Man's Shoes, and Meadows again displays his film knowledge proudly on his sleeve, displacing the avenging angel template to the East Midlands. Considine's bitter loner in a gas mask shares more than just style tips with John Rambo (they both enjoy a fine line in army surplus gear) as experiences tortures and taints their bluntly anti-social worldview. Where the mood allows, Meadows does introduce the odd touch of provincial idiosyncrasy; (the bumbling criminals make use of a Citroen Dolly as their street cruiser in the occasional moment of surreal farce) but the director's biting wit is used sparingly. On the whole Dead Man's Shoes is a much more muted affair; the cheekiness of knockabout locals being sacrificed on the altar of uncompromising tragedy, this is further dissipated by the film's strong anti-drug message.

Powerful and intense but low key, Dead Man's Shoes could seem too subdued to make an impact at the box office in the face of glossy fare from across the Atlantic, but if you're after an impressive British thriller which bites down and doesn't let go, this is excellent stuff.