Final Chance

Reviewed - Sixty-Six: HERE we have a gentle coming-of-age drama in which a North London boy struggles with the unhappy news that his Bar Mitzvah is to coincide with the 1966 World Cup Final.

The events that follow are so perfunctorily inevitable - particularly to anyone who remembers Jack Rosenthal dramas such as Bar Mitzvah Boy and P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang - that they hardly need description here. Young Bernie Reuben falls out with his parents. Elderly aunts cluck and fret. A blind rabbi wrings his hands. The only genuine surprise is the puzzling non-appearance of Maureen Lipman.

None of which is to suggest that Sixty Six is bad, exactly. Eddie Marsan, now confirmed as one of England's best character actors, brings characteristic sat-upon fragility to the role of Bernie's shopkeeper father, while Peter Serafinowicz is suave and charming as his more confident uncle. The film effectively conjures up a drabber corner of 1960s London that never chose to swing, and the dialogue is agreeably lively.

But after just 10 minutes the picture has already exhausted the limited possibilities of its flimsy scenario. Director Paul Weiland, whose infamously dreadful Leonard Part 6 almost destroyed Columbia Pictures back in 1987, is saddled with a plot that can only end one way, and neither he nor his writers discover anything worthwhile for the Reuben clan to do while they await Geoff Hurst's hat-trick.

Still, not releasing the film before the 2006 World Cup does suggest an admirable (if misguided) confidence on the part of its British producers. Can they really have imagined that Sixty Six would emerge into an England flushed with more recent footballing success? I think that's all over.