Three And Out by Paul Bullock

Having written film reviews for some years now, I've become accustomed to those wonderful little things called production notes. Most are bland and easily ignorable, but every now and then, the press pack comes with a nugget of information which grabs the attention. The pack I was handed for new Brit-com Three and Out is one such example. Included in the usual cast and crew interviews is a note from the filmmakers which acknowledges the unorthodox and potentially offensive content of the film and attempts to explain how they dealt with it. Generally, if a film needs such a thing, it’s not good enough to speak for itself and Three and Out doesn‘t buck this trend.

Written by Steve Lewis and Tony Owen and directed by Jonathan Gershfield (all three, tellingly, making their debut on the big screen), Three and Out focuses on Paul Callow (Mackenzie Crook), a lonely tube driver who accidentally kills two men while on duty and is told by colleagues that if he does away with a third within the month he'll be retired and paid ten years of wages in one lump sum. Seizing his chance to escape the Big Smoke, settle down on a remote Scottish island and achieve his dream of writing a novel, Paul sets out to find someone depressed enough to hurl himself into the path of his train and inadvertently goes on an emotional road trip as a result.

Such subject matter has made for great black comedies in the past, and having directed TV shows like Wild West and Twisted Tales, Gershfield is certainly no stranger to the darker side of humour. But the jokes of Three and Out are spectacularly ill-judged. During the course of the first act alone, Paul ghoulishly frequents themed online message boards looking for a victim, encounters a Frenchman (played, bizarrely, by Sir Anthony Sher - for shame) who wants to be eaten alive and offers his services to the Samaritans so he, presumably, can manipulate the depressed into killing themselves. And this guy is supposed to be the hero of the piece.

Thankfully, things take a turn for the better when he finally finds his man. Tommy (Colm Meany) is a down-on-his luck hobo who accepts Paul’s offer so he can spend his last days giving a sense of meaning to his life by making peace with wife Rose (Imelda Staunton) and daughter Frankie (new Bond girl Gemma Arterton), whom he abandoned some years ago. Staunton and Meany play the thawing tensions between their characters perfectly, and Owen and Lewis seem more at ease with drama than comedy, taking the film into some touchingly sweet and unexpected territory, and living up to the press notes’ promise of dealing with the subject matter as sensitively as possible.

Yet, a silly gag is never far away, be it in a slapstick chase, a farcical episode involving a sapphire ring or an unnecessarily graphic sex scene between Paul and Frankie. What’s worse, it all builds to a finale which feels implausible and disingenuous, with Owen and Lewis tagging a happy-smiley conclusion onto a story which really shouldn‘t have it, thereby simplifying and belittling the all-too-real traumas that the characters suffer through. Hardly any surprise then, that while the press notes reveal the script was filmed with the co-operation of the London Underground, it was merely sent to, not necessarily endorsed by, the Samaritans.