Gold - 'neither funny at all nor serious enough to be taken seriously'

Director Niall Heery’s previous outing was the low-key but entertaining Small Engine Repair and here, working off what I presume is a similarly modest budget, he’s fashioned a worthy if ultimately disappointing Irish film.

Certainly he’s assembled a good cast but the problem is the sheer implausibility and lack of any logic, internal or otherwise, in the script.

We have the distinctly odd Ray (David Wilmot), driving around with a sofa on the roof of his car and coming back into the lives of his ex-lover Alice (Kerry Condon) and daughter Abbie (Maisie Williams) after an absence of 10 years and some time in mental institutions.

However, they’re now with Frank (James Nesbitt), an athletics trainer determined to turn Maisie into a champion and sell his radical new coaching methods for a fortune. Naturally, Ray is invited to stay in the house whereupon increasingly deranged plot turns ensue.

Would a chap with a history of mental illness be allowed coach a teenage girls’ running team pretty much on the spot? How do you square your partner’s ex-boyfriend living under your roof, particularly when he always thought you were an idiot? Oh there’s more, much more.

The whole tone of Gold just doesn’t hang together, being neither funny at all nor serious enough to be taken seriously.

WATCH: