the audience applauded

Let's be realistic.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

So much potential. The storyline and cast look so promising - and manage fulfil their promise fleetingly.But fart humour? Punching a guy's lights out repeatedly? Who's this aimed at? Not your average Colin Firth fan.There are some genuinely funny moments. I so wanted to be entertained and managed to find a little sporadic fun. But overall this is bad enough that I feel compelled to write this. What a disappointing shame.

Entertaining, funny, light comedy with fantastic actors. Great seeing Cameron Diaz tap into Texan accent.

Sturgeon's Law (paraphrased) states "90% of fiction, music, art and films is of low quality". The Cohen Brothers have a pretty good track record with more than 50% of their offerings residing in the elite 10% of "good material". However, when good filmmakers miss the strike zone, they tend to hit the batter. In this case, the batter is the audience, and the Cohen brothers, despite good intentions, pitched one right at the head missing the strike zone by a mile. "Gambit" is a good idea with a good cast wasted on a poorly written script. The "funny parts" weren't funny, and I couldn't take the serious parts seriously.The central premise, decent but needed a lot more rewrites, involves the hustling of a billionaire magnate out of millions by selling him a fake painting. Harry Deane (Colin Firth) is a disgruntled employee seeking to outwit his vain employer, billionaire Lord Lionel Shabandar (Alan Rickman). Lord Lionel has a weakness for Monet paintings, particularly the ones featuring haystacks. Deane solicits the help of The Major (Tom Courtenay) who can replicate paintings by the best modern masters. Before the events of the story, we learn the Major has faked a Monet. Now they need a hook to entice their prey.They find a pretty young woman, PJ Puznowski (Cameron Diaz), a cowgirl rodeo enthusiast in Texas, and create a narrative in which her family has supposedly owned a real Monet for many years. Deane and the Major find her at a bar in Texas, and she agrees to engage in the deception for a fee of £500,000, or about $800,000 US. For the con to work, they take a picture of PJ and her mother sitting on an old 1970's couch in a caravan/mobile home which is then published in a rodeo magazine, which happens to be one of Lord Lionel's many publications. There's a short sequence in which Deane and the Major imagine how the con will play out successfully before they return the current "time" in which they need to convince PJ.She agrees, and then Deane shows the magazine photo to Lord Lionel who believes the painting only to be a replica because of its residing in a mobile home (called a "caravan" in British English) in Texas. Deane convinces him they should at least explore the possibility the painting is real, and they fly PJ to London. PJ meets Lionel, but rather to Deane's horror, PJ takes a liking to Lord Lionel and begins having doubts about engaging in the deception. Back at his flat, Deane keeps getting punched out by his neighbor. Is this supposed to be funny? Also, we learn Deane is nearly tapped out, being forced to pay extravagant prices for PJ's accommodations at the Savoy Hotel in London, one of the most expensive in Europe.Lord Lionel then asks PJ on a dinner date at a Japanese Restaurant where they meet the Kon'nichiwa Media Club who are there to interpret Japanese for the English-speaking guests. Up until now, some of the humor was barely tolerable and I wanted the story to get on track about the con. However, the Cohen Brothers opted for nearly-offensive stereotyping of Japanese people I guess for cheap laughs. Then Deane finds a priceless vase in the hallway of the hotel and tries to pilfer it by risking his life on the hotel ledge. Couldn't he have just stuffed it into a suitcase? I found the rest of the film going from hard-to-watch to nearly-insufferable.You have to credit the three leads for doing the best they could with a mediocre script. Rickman makes an excellent multi-zillionaire as PJ calls him, Firth a good straight-man to Diaz and Rickman, and Diaz as the clueless southern American who knows nothing about British/European culture. Unfortunately, there were too many over-the-top moments which I guess were designed to be funny but more in the "you can't be serious" department. Deane literally losing his pants to steal the vase was one of many. Also, I wasn't quite buying that Deane was "tapped out". I was expecting something at the beginning, maybe a sequence with him and Rickman in which he's denied a raise or similar denial for loyal service. Unfortunately, the Cohen brothers missed the strike zone on this one and ended up in Sturgeon's 90%. What a bummer.

(36%) An enormously average crime caper from the hands of people who we know can do much better. The cast was there, so were the writers, and the director isn't exactly a first timer. So what went wrong? First of all all the characters are HUGE stereotypes, and I do know that this is based around a film from an era in which that type of attitude was common and largely excepted, but this couldn't pigeon-hole its cast list even if it tried. Which I thick it probably did. Cameron Diaz plays essentially Daisy Duke crossed with Toy story's Jessie because she's from Texas where everyone wears a Stetson and eats T.bones all day while firing a pistol in the air. Colin Firth (best aspect of the film) and Alan Rickman on the other hand are as English as a rain soaked summer bank holiday. While the least said about the Japanese characters the better. This really isn't "Lay the favourite" bad, but you'd need to be very easily pleased to get anything from this.