Trying the blunt approach

This is the sort of Brit comedy that gets its final laugh by having a little black orphan girl of five sing a song from her native Burkina-Faso tribal homeland, and then say "Fuck". Contemptible, isn't it, to have to wring fun out of an infant's innocent obscenity?

But the adults in Simon Cellan Jones's remake of an obscure Danish movie (why go to Denmark for inspiration; aren't there enough dumb British scripts awaiting improvement?) fare no better.

Relocated to Tyneside, it stars two couples with infertility problems who want a child.

Neil (Richard Roxburgh) is a kitchen-fitter married to Jenny (Aisling O'Sullivan), a wife whose every other remark is a put-down of his lack of virility. Fortunately, she gets killed by a bread van just after adopting the little black orphan. Unfortunately, the film doesn't improve without her: it just exploits a very uncomfortable relationship between the now single dad and the child, whom the social services appear happy to leave in his irresponsible care.

The other couple is somewhat classier: Sonny (Jonathan Cake) is a local soccer star from Italy married to snooty Stevie (Justine Waddell). If the film were less crude about every element of this small social set, it could have done an amusing number on two-timing Italian footballers with a Geordie accent, doorbell chimes modelled on Verdi's la donna è mobile, and continuous groin strain.

As it is, Cake eats his part between mouthfuls of macho boasting and malapropisms ("I am making a whole breast of myself "; "You mean a complete tit").

As his spouse, Waddell is supposed to represent North-country bluntness, but she makes every petulant line sound a shrewish earful. Even worse is Patsy Kensit, playing the sort of gadabout slag who'll lie down in an aisle at an Asda hypermarket and let Michael Hodgson's flabby slob fornicate with her.

The playing is occasionally perky, but more often top-of-the-voice rant; almost every scene is lit as if the people were electrical goods in a shop window. The climax involves three men racing against time to prevent an abortion.

The only redeeming feature of this telly-sized bit of tail-chasing around town is the photogenic new art and architecture of Tyneside. We see Antony Gormley's Angel of the North so often it almost needs an Equity card as a supporting player. The Millennium Bridge just happens to be outside the kitchen-fitter's implausibly swish apartment.

But such fine structures, worthy beneficiaries of the Lottery Heritage Fund, make odious comparison with the crudely excrescent movie that the Film Council has helped get set up with money from the same National Lottery.