The Passably Distracting A Film with Me in It

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A Film with Me in It
Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon
Opens January 1, IFC Center

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• Horoscope
  August 31, 2004

More About

• Mark Doherty
• Dylan Moran

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Mark (Mark Doherty) is a hardly-working actor, snubbed at an audition to play "Concerned Neighbor," behind on rent, and barely tolerated by his live-in girlfriend (he's banished to sharing a room with his paralyzed, vegetative brother). The last hope is that his friend, Pierce (Dylan Moran), will write a film script and Mark, as leading man, will gain fame. Given Pierce's inability to decide on a plot (he's busy at pubs and playing the ponies) and Mark's worry-lined, no-longer-young presence, this is only slightly more probable than their making a moonshot. Limping, steady failure breaks into crisis when Mark's crumbling flat becomes a literal deathtrap. He's left with incriminating bodies on his hands, and circumstances impossible to explain to the authorities. When he pitches the situation to Pierce, Pierce dismisses the whole thing as unbelievable farce. Rather than going suitably manic, though, Mark and Pierce, turned co-conspirators, take their bad-to-worse luck with a resignation that we could call, like the black comedy and blarney, "typically Irish." Doherty and Moran have some good banter—as when they belatedly discover Mark's cuckolding through text messages—but monotony sets in as nothing comes up to elevate A Film above passably distracting corpse-disposal comedy.