AFTER reading Paul Torday’s book, I gave copies to two friends. So I awaited the film with great optimism.

I left the cinema feeling mild disappointment. Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay adequately encapsulates the threads of the plot but despite director Lasse Hallstrom’s doing his best to overcome its problems, I’m not persuaded to give that extra half star to a film I found flat, listless, lacking the book’s clever sparkle of ongoing comedy without replacing it with a credible tension.

Playing Dr Alfred Jones, a Fisheries Department scientist working on freshwater recreational fishing, makes no demands on Ewan McGregor.

Emily Blunt plays property consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot engaged to manage the proposal by keen angler and Yemeni oil squillionnaire Sheikh Muhammed (Ari Waked) to develop a recreational fishery in the middle of the desert and later use the water to irrigate agriculture.

The film’s omission of a couple of important minor characters is offset by giving the Prime Minister’s spin doctor a total sex change.

In the book, he’s Peter. Playing her, Kristen Scott Thomas has fun with the best of the comic moments, evocations of “Yes Minister”.

If you haven’t read the book, there is no possible reason to avoid the film. But if you have, be aware of what to expect. Underpinning the story’s real conflict, its exposition of the fishery science is spot on.

At Dendy, Greater Union, Hoyts