Mike McCahill 

Barbecue review – boringly white-bread with no cinematic ambition

Mike McCahill; A French film about a bunch of fiftysomethings in mid-life crisis, that turns out to be no better than a cheesy TV drama you might find on ITV
  
  

Barbecue film still
No meat ... Barbecue Photograph: PR

This is a limply chummy French midlife crisis movie, with Lambert Wilson heading up a group of greying friends as a philandering fiftysomething obliged to reassess his values in the wake of a heart attack. Everyone’s taking it easy from there: that coronary thrombosis provides the dramatic peak of a film otherwise composed of a boringly white-bread social set lunching, playing boules and bickering with no particular wit or style. Bright sitcom styling only exposes the absence of cinematic ambition or purpose: it’s all too easy to imagine an ITV primetime version starring one Glenister or another, and it wouldn’t be any less skippable.

 

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