The Grand Seduction is a gentle, amiable but toothless comedy from Canadian director Don McKellar. It could roughly be placed in the tradition of Local Hero and Whisky Galore!, but for me, its whimsy is sugary and contrived. The setting is a pretty but recession-hit harbour town tiresomely named Tickle Head, where there is no work for fishermen and unemployment is sapping morale. Breezy local mayor Murray (Brendan Gleeson) discovers a petrochemical company is prepared to site a plant there, bringing hundreds of jobs, but only if the town can prove it is a proper community with a regular doctor. So Murray uses his connections to blackmail a plastic surgeon from the big city with a highly improbable passion for cricket (this performance is phoned in by Taylor Kitsch) to come to their cutesy little backwater for one month and be the bogus medic they need to parade in front of the visiting oil bigwigs. But might this cynic fall in love with the place? And might they feel ashamed of having used and deceived him? It’s a bit of a soppy, sappy film that wastes Gleeson’s talent and incidentally appears to imply that bribing oil-company executives is a victimless crime.