Blow Dry

Daily Telegraph Review Tim Robey

Extract from 30th March 2001

No less wasteful of its cast is the woeful Blow Dry, a British comedy containing so few laughs that The Full Monty's screenwriter,Simon Beaufoy has been involved in a legal battle to remove his name from the credits.

Understandable though this is, given the result, one wonders how he can altogether escape blame. The premise is perfectly functional - a small Yorkshire town prepares to host a high-profile hairdressing competition - but the characters leave a lot to be desired.

What is worse, and not Beaufoy's fault, is that they're miscast almost across the board. Alan Rickman makes a real mess of his role as a local barber, and Natasha Richardson does an ill-advised Emma Thompson act as his estranged bi-sexual wife. "Old times stopped 10 year back, lass, when you upped and went," he says to her - a line provoking more mirth than any intentional jokes that Beaufoy or his script doctors have managed to come up with.

Rachel Griffiths, playing the woman for whom Richardson left him, is rather more on the ball, and Bill Nighy is tartly vicious as the most cut-throat of the rival coiffeurs. The weakest of the weak links are in fact two American imports: Rachel Leigh Cook (She's All That), as Nighy's neglected daughter, and Josh Hartnett (The Virgin Suicides), as the inexplicable, variably accented spawn of Rickman and Richardson.

It's a frizzy perm of a movie - you don't hate it, you just feel sorry for it. Overdressed, tacky, and almost accidentally touching at times, it just cannot get anything right.

 

Article copyright The Daily Telegraph 2001