Don't Worry About Me - DVD - 10/4/10

David has a one night stand with Liver Bird Karen when she visits London. In the morning it's fairly obvious that it has meant more to David than Karen. He seems oblivious to this and when he finds a presentation that she is to deliver that afternoon in the hotel room he jumps on the Megabus to Liverpool in order to give it to her. That leads to an awkward confrontation with Karens boyfriend and David being stranded in Liverpool with no money to get home. When he decides to use his last few pounds to bet on a dog race the girl in the bookies takes pity on him, lends him 20p to take his stake up to three pounds and gives him a hot tip which wins and the two of them decide to spend the afternoon together spending the winnings.

It's not much of a plot really and, to be honest, it's not much of a film. Much was made about it being Saint David of Morrisseys directorial debut but for me that isn't something to get excited about. Morrissey is much loved, even revered, by the industry but I don't "get" him. He appears to be an actor who has spent most of his career in fairly average roles in fairly average shows. Sadly, for him, he has now progressed from average actor in average roles to average director of an average film.

The film stinks of "made for TV" due, in part I am sure, to it's low budget but due more to Morrisseys own life in TV. He seems to have been unable to make the transition from small to big screen. This may be because the bulk of his own career has been in television where the aesthetic is different. His experience of working in cinema includes highlights such as "Basic Instinct 2" and "The Reaping"...not exactly films destined to inspire you to dizzy artistic heights.

The problem with the film is that Morrissey, like many Liverpudlians, has a romanticised view of his city and the people in it. "Salt of the earth", "...funniest people in the world", "earthy", "honest" etc etc. In truth Liverpool is a fairly drab, grubby town where you have a better than average chance of being stabbed or robbed by gangs of teenagers. I've come over all Boris Johnson here...I won't be apologising though. The "professional Northerner" schtick runs through this film and where the characters from Liverpool are all honest, funny and gritty the Southerner, David, is workshy, offensive and shallow. The North is "real" and the South is "fake".

If this had popped up on BBC 1 on a holiday Monday it would have been diverting but as a "proper" film it is flawed in more ways than you could count. Characters with no real depth (other than someone having a brother with Downs Syndrome and another who has a mother with depression...I'm not making this up), genuinely awful script moments, a scene where a man beats up a giant teddy bear because a girl he has known for less than six hours has fallen out with him; do I need to go on.

David Morrissey then ladies and gentlemen, a man who appears in lots of television programmes, several dreadful films and who has now made a dreadful television movie and is attempting to pass it off as a real film.

Avoid.