Closing the Ring

Sadly, this is not the eagerly-anticipated sequel to Return of the King, 'Lord of the Rings IV: Frodo Comes Out', but a ham-fisted attempt at an epic World War II romance, told through ineffectually-placed flashbacks in the early '90s. Revolving around a ring that was discovered in the hills above Belfast after an American war plane crashed there fifty years previously, the film squeezes in everything from IRA punishment beatings to geriatric love triangles and Mischa Barton's arse, yet still manages to be thoroughly hard work. OK, the flashbacks first: they don't even begin to work. There is no sense of the time, other than some awful-looking facial hair, and they are badly acted by a cast who look like they are putting on a dress rehearsal for a community play. Barton is the strongest thing here, and that really is saying something. The scenes with village idiot Jimmy in Belfast take far too long to go anywhere, and squeeze in too much subplot to work without causing headaches from excessive frowning and suspension of disbelief. The family squabble Stateside - caused by the flimsy narrative - is never properly expanded on, and gives old pros Plummer and MacLaine very little to work with. Campbell does her best as the angry daughter, but her character is essentially an inanimate object, with the minimal of context. The script feels like a book adaptation that preserved an abundance of characters in order to please readers, but is really just badly-structured. How the director of Gandhi has come to this is a sign of the times - a great storyteller attempting in vain to make an old fashioned love story from a crap script and a small budget. Closing the Ring tries very hard to be The Notebook and make its audience weep, but you have to engage us with characters before we begin to feel something towards them. Unfortunately, poor acting, uninspired direction and a truly awful script make this impossible. Closing the Ring is the type of film you would stumble across watching television with a grandparent on a Sunday afternoon, and watch purely for their amusement. Unless you're taking them to the cinema with you, I really wouldn't bother.