GONE TO THE DOGS

REVIEWED - MAN ABOUT DOG: It sometimes seems as if every male Irish writer under the age of, say, 35 has written a poor film script in which a bunch of slackers with comical nicknames - "I'm Nixer and this here's Dixer"- hatch a madcap scheme to avoid being kneecapped by a sinister hoodlum to whom they owe a great deal of money. Often one of the layabouts has a profoundly unamusing marijuana habit which invites viewers still in tertiary education to congratulate themselves on Precambrian notions of hipness as they enjoy the humour of recognition.

Pearse Elliott's screenplay for Man About Dog is no worse than most of its predecessors, but it is still pretty hopeless. Three Belfast boys - a charmer, an idiot and, God help us, a stoner - find themselves owing £50,000 to a homicidal bookmaker (played, with eye-watering inevitability, by Sean McGinley). The bookie sets a deadline for repayment that allows just enough time for a crazy plan to clatter its way to completion.

Half-heartedly indulging in a poorly stylised argot which incorporates bits of, as the script has it, "Gaelic", the lads set out to exploit a greyhound they have, for reasons too whacky to bother with, inherited from eccentric old Fionnula Flanagan. Along the way they fall out with a gang of travellers led by Pat Shortt and encounter difficulties finding hares at which to point the dog. "The only hairs here are on my head," someone says in a typical aside. There's also a wanking joke.

Man About Dog is directed by Paddy Breathnach, whose first two pictures, the fine, under-rated Ailsa and the much-loved I Went Down, confirmed him as one of the country's most skilled young film-makers. Here, tedious freeze-frames aside, he does a decent enough job with unpromising material. With the assistance of cinematographer Cian de Buitléar, Breathnach finds a soupy beauty in the rural landscapes and, as always, coaxes good performances from a decent cast.

The breezy, likeable Allen Leech is fine as the most sensible of the desperados, Ciaran Nolan does a good moron and Tom Murphy, who was so brilliant in the infinitely more intelligent Adam & Paul, just about retains his dignity while working through gags that would have made Cheech & Chong groan.

But this really does feel like a retrograde step for Breathnach. Man About Dog has a similar shape to I Went Down, but none of its wit, humanity or integrity. Mind you, the dialogue is better than that in the - mercifully unproduced - blokes-on-sofas-hatch-madcap-scheme script I wrote when I was 33.

Man About Dog will be accompanied in selected cinemas by Hugh Farley's Irish-language short, An Diog is Faide (The Longest Ditch). Telling the story of Sonnie Murphy, the Irish steeplechaser who, tragically, died a few short years after competing at the 1932 Olympics, the film uses its limited resources very effectively to recreate the swelter and bustle of the Los Angeles games.