Total Film "Mad Cows" Review - December 1999
Mad Cows - Out now - Cert 15What's the story ?
Maddy (Friel) is a young Aussie in London, with a new-born baby whose father, Alex (Wise), is pretending the two of them dont exist. While Maddy struggles with motherhood, her best friend Gillian (Lumley) is being pursued by the police for credit and fraud. Wrongly imprisoned (along with her son) for shoplifting, Maddy is duped into siging adoption papers. The desperate mother persuades Gillian to smuggle the child out and then escapes herself. Soon everyone is in pursuit of them.
Based on Australian Kathy Lette's novel and featuring Anna Friel's first out-and-out starring role, Mad Cows should have been something of an event: a British comedy to brag about. Sadly though, it's not. A rank-tasting cocktail of Carry On and The Monkess put in the blender at full pelt, Mad Cows is mad all right. It's just not very good.
The premise is fine: spunky Aussie takes on British penal and class systems while coming to terms with being a mum. And Lette's colourful language, if given space, should have lent enough flamboyance to make a half-decent comedy. The problem is the direction: Sara Sugerman is too self-consciously quirky, too eager to make a boisterous Britflick (you know it's a dog when Noel Gallagher's missus Meg Matthews and Harrods boss Mohammed Al Fayed share a scene). There's too much eneregy and not enough sense.
The result is a superannuated farce that demands more suspension of disbelief than a Benny Hill sketch. When both Friel and her baby are locked up after she's caught cooling her lactating breasts with a packet of frozen peas (the child even shares her cell), it's too ludicrous to be funny. Wost of all, everything happens at such a frantic pace that the dialogue (surely the reason for adapting the book in the first place) gets garbled in the mix.
Once you're over the shock of her (half-decent) Aussie accent and heaving (presumably false) breasts, Friel brings her customary freshness to the role of Maddy, while Lumley, as the upper-class con woman whose maternal instincts come too late, presents a magnificent, human version of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. Someone should have taken Friel, Lumley and cinematographer Pierre Aim (of La Haine fame) and made another - much funnier, much warmer - little comedy
Demetrios Matheou
Final Verdict
It looks a dream, has good performances and tons of classy British star power. But you still want to walk out after 10 minutes. Thi is in desperate need of an American script doctor/gag writer and a director with a little restraint.
Score: 2 out of 5.