“The Comeback Trail” (M) ***

A CYNIC might reasonably take the view that Hollywood’s sole innovative contribution to performance culture is the Western. Nobody makes Westerns nowadays like they did when I was a kid. The genre has migrated to outer space in the future. Boring.

Set in, around and about Hollywood, “The Comeback Trail” in a way commemorates that contribution. Producer Max (Robert De Niro) is broke. And he has just three days to repay a big debt to mobster Reggie Fontaine (Morgan Freeman). Light-bulb moment: announce a new production, insure its completion, kill the star in a dangerous stunt, use the insurance claim to settle the debt (this is a fantasy view of the insurance industry – companies didn’t get where they are by being sympathetic to dodgy claimants).

Max and his deputy Walter (Zach Braff) set about making a Western starring washed-out aged star Duke Montana (Tommy Lee Jones) once big in Westerns and staging a stunt that will result in a claim when the old bloke dies. As Robbie Burns put it: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. And that, friends, is what writer/director George Gallo’s movie is about.

Is it funny? Not on as large a scale as it might have set out to achieve. 

Is it any good? Well, it’s not all that bad. It mocks its own history. It’s rowdy, it’s dramatically transparent and it makes no demand on the watcher’s brain. 

Does it send a message? Well, it does but you have to wait for the closing credits for the message to sink in. How many producers does a good movie need? 

“The Comeback Trail” is a satire on Hollywood’s view of itself, a lampoon that knows no restraint, a send-up evoking the golden age of movies when audiences were less erudite than they are in this age of over-supply of moving images delivered over a range of accessible technologies. It doesn’t say much worth hearing about anything that needs saying. And why should it?

At all cinemas