Belabored Muse

Rotten to the Core. Halfway through this eccentric British comedy about a pack of bumbling criminals, moviegoers whose memories reach back a decade or so are apt to grow nostalgic and inquire rhetorically: Guinness, anyone? Rotten invites comparison to Sir Alec's memorable extralegal capers in The Man in the White Suit and The Lavender Hill Mob, but its low-jinx omits such essentials as wit, slyness and style.

In the rogues' gallery currently at hand are three idiotic young jailbirds fresh out of prison and admonished to "limit yourselves to a little honest pilfering." They are quickly embroiled in hijacking a train, kidnaping a German NATO general, and grabbing a payroll of about -L-1,000,000. Mastermind of the scheme is a bespectacled genius (Anton Rodgers) who operates a crime school fronting as a nature clinic where dotty old ladies imbibe mineral water laced with gin. Rodgers' girl friend (Charlotte Rampling) is a pert socialite making her criminal debut as the temptress assigned to dazzle a lieutenant of the armed guards, though much of her wickedness is spent in murdering the Queen's English with such nauseous effusions as "how rave-making" or "supremo!" All of Rotten's cast labors mightily. But on recent evidence, England's humor of idiosyncrasy is dead or in extremis, for nothing so dampens the spirit as to see the muse of comedy working up a sweat.

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