ManAbout Dog review

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Three scraggy, gamble-happy Belfast chappies (Allen Leech, Ciaran Nolan, Tom Jordan Murphy) do a runner down South from a "hooky bookie" (Sean McGinley) and a life-threatening debt. They flog a dead-loss greyhound to some grunting tinker types, but realise it's a natural, potentially lucrative, hare-courser. Can they steal back the dog, jip the "gyppos" and clear the arrears? What do you think?

Director Paddy Breathnach has been on a dip since 1997's excellent I Went Down and there's little of that picture's wit in this charmless road-trip flick, a cartoonish caper that's loaded with multiplex-friendly scatology and cursed with a knuckle-gnawing voiceover. Worse still, eight years on from Trainspotting, we're still stuck with the standard upstart archetypes (smart Renton-ish narrator, Spud-u-like loony, Sick Boy-style drug-hoover/ Casanova).

The hare-coursing scenes are surprisingly effective and a few of the comic episodes hit the mark - - particularly a rampant chase involving chainsaws, crossbows and dairy products. But this is more farty old hound than perky underdog.

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