Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.
Based on Australian writer 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 Monkees 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 Sugarman 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 Mohamed Al Fayed share a scene). There's too much energy 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. Worst 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.
It looks like a dream, has good performances and tons of classy British star power. But you still want to walk out after 10 minutes. This is in desperate need of an American script doctor/gag writer and a director with a little restraint.
