Right, here is a quiz for you. As I have said, again and again, I’m fed up with doing everything around here and, as no one at The Spectator has offered to help in any way at all, I think it’s only fair that you, the readers, do some of the work. Ready? Let’s go, then. So, there is this guy, Max (Russell Crowe), a rapacious London banker who has built an empire of greed trading bonds, and he has this uncle, Uncle Henry (Albert Finney), who dies and leaves him a beautiful estate and vineyard in Provence and so Max goes to Provence, intending to sell the beautiful estate for lots and lots of moolah — what does he care? — and then what happens to Max? Is it:
a) he promptly sells up and returns to London, film over;
b) he eats a bad moule, writhes a lot and is dead by morning, film over;
c) he finds love, friendship and the true meaning of life and blah-de-blah-de-blah and is morally reborn blah-de-blah among the grapes and the lavender and those funny French people who don’t speak much English except the ones you happen to come across, who all do, which is handy?
If you answered a) I will say this: ‘I wish!’ If you answered b) then I will repeat: ‘I wish!’ And if you answered c) but then thought, no, not possible, this is a Ridley Scott film, after all, with Russell Crowe in it, so it can’t be as dull and predictable and banal as all that, I will say this: ‘Wrong!’ This film is so terrible and so boring that had it not been for Mark Kermode, the film critic, sitting...
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