A quarter of an hour into The Problem With People, there’s a 15-second clip of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – and it’s the best thing about this spectacularly unfunny comedy co-written by its American star, Paul Reiser (Mad About You, The Kominsky Method, Stranger Things).
In the clip, a young Peter Capaldi collects Peter Siegert from Aberdeen airport and they head north through the Grampian mountains in a brand new beige Corolla. In similar fashion, the real star of The Problem With People is the picturesque Irish countryside, which director Chris Cottam captures handsomely in a series of cutaway shots that pay homage to the earlier film.
Four minutes after that Local Hero clip, for instance, we see Colm Meaney – best known for playing Miles O'Brien in Star Trek – picking up his American visitor (Reiser) from the local train station in the same beige Corolla, albeit now showing its age 40 years on.
Reiser plays Barry, a New York property developer whose favourite movie is Local Hero. One day he receives a telephone call out of the blue from a long-lost Irish cousin, Ciaran (Meaney), who invites him to visit Ireland in order to heal a century-old family feud. Local Heroics becomes a running gag: “Oh, my god!” exclaims Barry’s daughter Natalya (Jane Levy). “It’s like that movie: divorced guy goes to a little town in Ireland." “That wasn’t Ireland, by the way,” he replies. “That was Scotland – two totally separate countries!"
And we’re dealing with two totally separate films, too: one is a classic Scottish comedy while the other merely belongs to a lacklustre Hollywood tradition of stories about Americans falling in love with the Celtic fringe (The Quiet Man, Brigadoon). Unfortunately, Reiser lacks the charisma of a John Wayne, Gene Kelly, or even Burt Lancaster in Forsyth’s movie, though he and Meaney play well off each other and their onscreen personalities.
But the main problem with The Problem With People is its woefully cliché-ridden script (co-written by Wally Marzano-Lesnevich), which could have been copied and pasted from dozens of buddy films, Step Brothers, for example, or, going further back, The Odd Couple – except without the jokes.
Relying on Oirish stereotypes and obvious culture-clash jokes, the movie looks like any other straight-to-video situation comedy you might find scrolling through Amazon Prime or Netflix. It would have struggled to get a box-office release without Reiser and Meaney (who co-produced it), because it commits the cardinal sin of comedy – it just isn’t funny.
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