Margot at the Wedding (15)

Feb 29 2008 By Graham Young

THOUGHT I'd had enough of Jack Black after Be Kind Rewind last week? Then read on!

This movie is insufferable - and puts Black on a par with Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Roy Schneider for their ability to induce uncontrollable BSI - bottom-shuffling instability.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach won critical plaudits for his Oscar-nominated 2005 movie about a divorce, The Squid and the Whale.

And Margot at the Wedding has some equally realistic exchanges between Nicole Kidman's Margot and sister Pauline (played by Baumbach's own wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh) who's set to marry lazy Malcolm (Black).

Margot hates Malcolm before she even meets him, and she has an ulterior motive for visiting, too.

But it's not enough to remotely save this 92-minute hotch-potch which has been on the shelf since the BBFC classified it five months ago.

Black, for example, is reduced to standing naked in front of a mirror while examining his expansive gut and what lies beneath.

One admires his honesty in a town full of perfection-seeking bodies.

But the 38-year-old Californian has become a tiresome, one-trick pony far removed from the driving force behind The School of Rock five years ago.

Even when he gets a good kicking he can't convince that his anguish is for real.

Many more turkeys like this and he'll be Jack Blacklisted. As for Kidman, it's not been a good 12 months after Invasion and The Golden Compass.

Only similarly warring / barely speaking sisters will find any crumbs of comfort here.

Yet even they will probably be mystified by the final scene which makes the ending to No Country for Old Men seem like a masterpiece.

Website: www.margot atthewedding.com