Dead Weight

On a Clear Day

Directed by Gaby Dellal

On a Clear Day makes you wish The Full Monty never existed. Which isn't to say that the latter was worthless: Director Peter Cattaneo's comedy about laid-off blue collar workers-turned-amateur male strippers was a lot of fun. The lovable riff on gender relations was at once light and substantive and contained a hopeful (but not treacly) message that men could still be men even after losing their jobs and embracing a new gig that required them to serve as bearish faux sex-objects for women. Perhaps unfortunately, that film's unexpected worldwide box-office success stoked a gold rush mentality in Great Britain, Australia and here, leading to a never-ending procession of self-actualization comedies which-whatever their plot differences-seem like knockoffs in retrospect: Waking Ned Devine, Billy Elliott and the like. Here we are, almost a decade later, suffering through the dregs of the knockoffs, the worst of which might be On a Clear Day, a Scottish comedy-drama about an unemployed shipyard foreman with "Big Dreams" that's so calculating yet inept that your mind wanders from the action onscreen and envisions winsome male strippers being fed into the gears of industrial machinery. I'm sure writer Alex Rose and director Gaby Dellal meant well, but that doesn't count for much in a film where almost nothing goes right.

The magnificent actor-filmmaker Peter Mullan turns in the first bad performance I can recall him giving. Here, he's Frank Redmond: unemployed shipbuilder and still-grieving father of a son who drowned decades earlier who now dreams of swimming the English Channel. Nine-tenths of Mullan's acting consists of scrunching up his face to telegraph "depression"; the remaining tenth is subdivided between rueful smiles, manic motion and disoriented glancing about (to convey the idea that Frank is "lost").

The reliably superb Brenda Blethyn, as Frank's wife Joan, comes off as a dithering budgie. As Frank's perennially upbeat, young ex-coworker Danny, Lord of the Rings co-star Billy Boyd overplays the character's sunny-side-up personality so relentlessly that for the first half-hour, I mistakenly assumed he was developmentally disabled.

Even small roles that have "scene stealer" written all over them are so weirdly misjudged that it's as if you're watching a film made by space robots that landed on earth last week. Local fish-and-chips shop owner Chan (Benedict Wong), for instance, is initially presented as a stoic near-mute who stands there and suffers while racist customers mock him and a potato deliveryman unceremoniously drops bags of produce on his floor with such force that they split open. Soon after, we learn that he's not only fluent in English but can recite plot-relevant poems at the drop of a hat.

Add in consistently dull compositions, pointlessly frenetic camerawork, a cutesy score that sighs and chuckles on your behalf and a script that underscores every salient thematic point with a fat-tipped Sharpie ("You got made redundant," another co-worker warns Frank. "You should face up to it like everyone else."), and you're looking at an early candidate for the title of the year's crappiest foreign film picked up by a major distributor (Focus Features, a subdivision of NBC Universal, coming off the success of Brokeback Mountain).

Midway through the picture, in a sequence where Danny falls off a boat during a practice outing for Frank's English Channel run, I found myself wishing Danny's buddies would accidentally run over him in their rescue attempt, sending his propeller-severed noggin spiraling into the briny deep and transforming the latest Full Monty spawn into a cover-up psychodrama modeled on the fishing trip section of Short Cuts. Anything would have been preferable to Dellal's chosen course-which leaves a lot of fine actors lost at sea.