Trading places | 28 December 2012

The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If it were up to me, I would charge film-makers for every minute — £1, say; let’s not be greedy — over 90 minutes that I’m kept in the cinema for no good reason. In this instance, as the film comes in at two and a half hours, I think I’m owed £60 (plus VAT and expenses) and I will be invoicing Mr Rushdie directly, as we cannot let him off the hook.

Rushdie has no one to blame for this but Rushdie. Rushdie wrote the script. Rushdie is the executive producer. Rushdie provides the narrative voice-over, which proves useful whenever the film paints itself into a storytelling corner, as it so often does.