Well heeled

Reviewed - Sleeping Dogs:HERE'S a film that believes itself to be about twice as dangerous as it actually is. It is a firework dressed as Semtex. It is a scowling teenage Slipknot fan slamming the bedroom door on his long-suffering parents.

Bobcat Goldthwait, lowbrow comedian and professional chat-show guest, begins his perfectly amiable comedy with the coy depiction of a sexual act that, for reasons of decorum, defies detailed explanation in The Irish Times. Let us just point the reader towards the film's title, mention that the only human present is the heroine, Amy, and leave it at that.

Some time later, Amy and her fiancée are having a playful discussion on the subject of guilty secrets. He tells her some story about biscuits and manly effusions, but she cannot quite bring herself to spit out her own indiscretion. Later, the couple make their way to Amy's childhood home and a family that seems to have been composed from discarded Fokkers and Halls (as in Annie). Amy is eventually persuaded to tell her boyfriend the truth. When the news leaks out, domestic hell is unleashed.

Why, exactly, would any sane modern woman feel the compunction to own up to such an offence? Is this honesty nonsense an American thing? It's just one of several mysteries in this very peculiar film.

Oddest of all is the disconnect between the picture's supposedly shocking jumping off point and the utterly conventional territory it ends up occupying. Despite being about what it is sometimes about, Sleeping Dogs is, at its centre, a standard romcom, with all the stock reversals and narrative compromises its genre demands.

Still, though shot punitively cheaply on grainy video, the film, bolstered by a winning performance from Hamilton, is modestly effective on those terms. Everything gets tied up nicely and all concerned receive their just desserts. If Goldthwait can resist the temptations of naughtiness for naughtiness's sake, he may yet develop a career directing Kate Hudson pictures.

There are, I suppose, worse fates.