By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: *)
Writer-director Martin is well known across the ditch, though, like a lot of Australian talent, he's a Kiwi boy - born in the King Country and raised in the Waikato. In his work in the early 90s on the television sketch comedy series The Late Show,
he collaborated with some of the people who would later make Frontline for the small screen and the hit film The Castle.
This, his feature debut, is billed as a comedy thriller but it's never even remotely thrilling and only very fitfully funny. It casts Molloy (who was in the bowling comedy Crackerjack) and fellow comic Franklin as Ben Kinnear and Mike Paddock, detectives with the "Zero Tolerance Unit" which seems to be some sort of elite force though it's not really plain what they do.
Busted down to uniform duties after an improbable bungle, they become aware of a high-level in-house conspiracy which, of course, they manage to snuff out.
We might forgive the implausibility that our heroes, who are barely able to tie their own shoelaces, manage to unravel a complicated scam. We could even overlook the plot's many other inanities (any 8-year-old knows that the way they do a pencil rubbing to read some writing on a pad doesn't work) if the film had any comic effervescence.
A crowd of familiar faces struggles with the material but they never work as a team. Brough - another of our exports - stands out because he doesn't try to laugh at his character, a computer geek; he just plays him and lets us laugh.
The rest is rather a test of endurance.
Cast: Mick Molloy, Bob Franklin, Judith Lucy, Marshall Napier, Shaun Micallef, Alan Brough
Director: Tony Martin
Running time: 94 mins
Rating: M, violence and offensive language
Screening: Village, Hoyts
