Modern-day parable with a sting in the Tail

The only reason to see veteran writer-director John Boorman's new film is to appreciate a typically bullish, dynamic performance by Brendan Gleeson.

He plays a cheerfully corrupt Irish property developer who thinks he's hallucinating when he sees a rougher version of himself around Dublin (also played by Gleeson), but then discovers from his nearest relative (Sinead Cusack) that he has a twin brother.

The confident businessman becomes increasingly undermined as his identical twin steals his credit cards, his wife and his identity.

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This might have made an interesting thriller; but the plot becomes more and more unlikely and far too dependent on the central character behaving with extreme foolishness.

Boorman's central theme, insufficiently woven into his narrative, is the debauchery, drunkenness and lack of caring in modern Ireland, and a few scenes reminded me of Lindsay Anderson's disaffected view of Seventies Britain in Britannia Hospital (1982).

But Boorman's critique seems more bad-tempered than coherent, and several sequences leave a much nastier taste in the mouth than Boorman intends - especially the misogynistic scenes when our hero's upmarket wife (Kim Cattrall) is turned on by his rougher doppelganger.

An unsatisfying 'happy' ending is achieved through a series of deeply implausible characterreversals; and there hangs over the proceedings an air of heavy-handed parable.

Boorman obviously thinks he's telling us something about the schizophrenic nature of modern Ireland, the so-called 'Celtic tiger', and about the gap between rich and poor; but what his argument is remains indecipherable.

Boorman has always been a better director than a writer, and once again it's his script that lets him down - that, and a kind of sourness that makes this film hard to like, even if you happen to share its distaste for modern society.