Starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt
Directed by Lasse Hallstr枚m
The fact that its premise reads a little like an email scam doesnt make it any easier for a viewer to buy into the flimsy hokum that director Lasse Hallstr枚m is peddling here.
In place of a wealthy Nigerian looking to move money, we have an enterprising Arab sheik (Amr Waked) intent on bringing sport fishing to arid Yemen. Furthermore, hes so committed to his pet cause that hes willing to cough up 50-million in start-up cash to anyone wholl give him the time of day or, better yet, a creative solution. Answering the call of his British legal representative Harriet (Emily Blunt) is Fred (Ewan McGregor), a milquetoast fisheries bureaucrat and life-long angler. Before long, the mismatched pair are mixing business and pleasure.
Admittedly, fishing rivals birding as pursuits not exactly begging for a big-screen treatment. However, whereas 2011s abysmal The Big Year largely mocked amateur ornithologists, Simon Beaufoys screenplay (adapted from Paul Tordays novel) has the common decency to explore the appeal and underlying philosophies of fishing. Consequently, when Waked passionately asserts that Fishermen are men of faith, he makes a surprisingly persuasive argument.
Unfortunately, practically everything else here feels perfunctory. Subsisting on McGregor and Blunts easy chemistry and natural charm, the film has no stomach for adversity, summarily nipping any source of antagonism in the bud. At least a ridiculously rushed sequence in which Fred employs a fishing rod to foil an assassination attempt seems destined to be immortalized in a YouTube montage of WTF movie moments. The rest of this romantic comedy is dead in the water. Curtis Woloschuk
