Philip French 

You Instead – review

Two rock performers are thrown together at a Scottish music festival – but sparks don't fly, writes Philip French
  
  

Luke Treadaway and Natalia Tena in You Instead.
Luke Treadaway and Natalia Tena star in You Instead. Photograph: PR

In the most famous film ever set in Scotland, the hero and heroine are, for an amusing, mutually embarrassing time, handcuffed to each other. Something similar happens to Adam, an American rock star (Luke Treadaway) and Morello, a feisty British fem-rock performer (Natalia Tena). They're manacled together in the name of peace and love by a nutty black evangelist at the 2010 T in the Park, the gigantic Scottish rock festival that's the Caledonian answer to Glastonbury. Over the course of the film, Adam and Tena do all the things Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll didn't dare do (or even think of doing) in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. But they generate little fun or chemistry, and the cliches come as thick and slick as the Woodstock-style mud churned up around them. The film's chief strength resides in Giles Nuttgens's skilled cinematography, which apparently enabled most of the film to be shot at the festival in not much more than a week.

 

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