Certainly there is much that is of rich satiric potential in the film. But where it should have flown as dark satire, it tends to get relayed as lowbrow slapstick. The credits note that the screenplay has been based on another original screenplay. One gets the clear impression that it has been substantially reworked from the original conception to the likings of director Mark Joffe, previously known for the likes of Cosi (1996) and The Matchmaker (1997). Joffe’s films essentially inhabit the same Australian comedic territory as the likes of The Castle (1996) and the Crocodile Dundee films – in featuring the vulgar triumphs of parochial and individualistic rough diamond characters who put one over pretentious city slickers. But here Joffe starts to caricature – the lawyers, the insurance agents and the clerics are all cast as pompous straw figures, while the plaintiffs are equally caricatured as decent, ordinary working class people who have been exploited and cheated by a greedy insurance industry. And Joffe’s slapstick approach tends to subvert the satirical bite of the film. Where the film should have sunken its teeth into its targets, Joffe concentrates on clumsy scenes involving Connolly falling over drunk in a Japanese restaurant and fold-up beds that won’t stay unfolded. There is a likably witty piece with Judy Davis trying to get aboard Connolly’s boat as he leaves a jetty, but it is not really a slapstick type of film. You can also see that the central role has been tailored to fit the presence of Connolly, who at least rises to form and gives a likable variant on his irascible, foul-mouthed Scotsman persona. (Although while one can accept him as a fisherman, it does strain credibility accepting such a character as a former lawyer).

Where the film falls down altogether is the ending. While it aspires to mount a satiric attack on religious institutions, it falters at its height with the sudden, presumedly miraculous, appearance at the end of a dove, as though it were a heavenly messenger. It is really a cloyingly maudlin and banal way for such a film to go out on. The effect is sort of akin to an embittered crank atheist undergoing a sudden deathbed conversion and getting all mushy-eyed about love, children and the beauty of life. Sadly what the film seems to miss in such a moment of transcendent religious mummery is the satiric note the scene is underscored with that has everybody reacting with religious awe to the appearance of a dove which, as the defence counsel points out, is really only a cockatoo. In playing it all straight-faced, the film turns whatever satiric ire it may have raised throughout into the corniest kind of religious sentimentalism.