Movie Reviews

“HOW do you explain this frivolous spending during a recession?” demands one of the characters of our eponymous hero early in Arthur (12A), in a bid to deflect audience resentment at the sight of Russell Brand playing a playboy billionaire who wastes thousands of dollars at every hand’s turn.

The trouble with Arthur is not that its hero is a whinging, feckless spendthrift; it’s that all the characters, Arthur’s nanny Hobson (Helen Mirren) excepted, are either dislikeable or dispensable, as Arthur struggles to decide whether he loves free-spirited author Naomi (Greta Gertwig) more than he loves his debauchery.

The original Arthur (1981) was a lightweight comedy that played to Dudley Moore’s strengths, and particularly his ability to make for a convincingly happy drunk, but this version is interesting for the extent to which it exposes Russell Brand’s limits as a leading man. Charismatic and diverting in supporting roles, Brand’s patented brand of outrageous narcissism is here constrained by the rom-com formula, so that Arthur’s supposedly freewheeling iconoclasm manifests itself as brattish self-indulgence. Mirren’s turn as a surrogate mother is by turns humorous and touching, and Brand is laugh-out-loud funny in places, but Luiz Guzman, Jennifer Garner and Nick Nolte are all wasted by director Jason Winer.