What a clever wheeze it must have seemed over a late-night Chablis in the Groucho as Brit packers Law and ladywife Frost assembled their closest chums and declared they should make a movie, shot in their own home, where they would all play themselves.
What's more, in this oh-so clever ruse, they would comment upon the nature of friendship using that old film-within-a-film device, a clever rigged set of unseen cameras recording all the guys and girls being 'real' about and with one another. Wait, there's more. As the final piece in this postmodern quiche Lorraine they were busy overbaking, the setting will be a wake, indeed, that of the recently deceased (no, murdered) Jude Law where his last bequest of his buddies is to watch the movie that he been assembling so recently.
If, under the comfortable fug of fine wine, it sounded dandy, as film entertainment it's regrettable, self-indulgent mush that skirts the odd telling insight into the two-facedness of close friendships in favour of the worst type of vérité arse. You know, hand-held crappycam images of bathroom confessions, ludicrous episodes of drug taking and Law talking to camera to bestow his philosophy - cutting back to the shocked ensemble and Winstone shouting a lot.
There are some minorly amusing trifles within such navel-gazing when the goonish players (half of whom once trod the corridors of Grange Hill) are shown in their clumsy, useless, rather pathetic realities, but none of it sticks and the nasty stabs of violence leave a bad taste. And the whodunnit strand is micro-thin and just about the most obvious thing in the world.
You get the feeling the irritating bunch are all so pleased with themselves for their laid-bare stridency and barbed honesty, but the pleasures of their indulgence are painfully null and void. Tiresome in the extreme.