Dumb and dumber | 12 July 2018

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a knockabout farce set during the Troubles. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch it uses the expiry of a pet to examine human obsessiveness and self-delusion. But it takes two hours rather than three minutes to make its point. We meet a handsome terrorist, Padraic (Aidan Turner), whose adoration of his black cat symbolises his crazed devotion to republicanism. The cat is accidentally run over by Davey, an amiable twerp on a bike, who must find a new cat or face reprisals from the insanely brutal Padraic. Donny, Padraic’s dad, offers to help Davey and they borrow a ginger cat, which they blacken with boot polish.

That’s the level of narrative ingenuity here: children’s television. The writer, Martin McDonagh, works from a very limited psychological palette. He can barely write a female character and his males have only two discernible traits, stupidity and malice. Donny and Davey are merely stupid.