# Honest (2000)

### reviewed by
Ian Waldron-Mantgani

     Honest     *1/2

Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre) Released in the UK by Pathé on May 26, 2000; certificate 18; 110 minutes; country of origin UK; aspect ratio 1.85:1

Directed by David A. Stewart; produced by Eileen Gregory, Michael Peiser. Written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, David A. Stewart, Karen Lee Street. Photographed by David Johnson; edited by David Martin.

    CAST.....
    Peter Facinelli..... Daniel Wheaton
    Nicole Appleton..... Gerry
    Natalie Appleton..... Mandy
    Melanie Blatt..... Jo
    James Cosmo..... Tommy Chase
    Jonathan Cake..... Andrew Price-Stevens
    Corin Redgrave..... Duggie Ord

"Honest" is too confident and professional to really be called bad, but it's still a bewildering mess. There's too much going on in terms of art direction and too much going nowhere in terms of plot, and although it's intended as a star vehicle for the pop group All Saints, two of them are hardly ever onscreen and the third plays a character who hides her feelings. I have a question for the four screenwriters: What the hell is this movie about, why does it take so long to get going, is it comic or dramatic, and who is the main player?

Those All Saints girls -- Nicole Appleton, Natalie Appleton and Melanie Blatt -- play three sisters in the East End of London in the 1960s. They dress up as men and pull armed robberies, but the folks in the neighbourhood don't know this, and think they're just a bunch of harmless young tarts. During one botched heist of a magazine office, an American hippie journalist, Daniel Wheaton (Peter Facinelli), captures and then proceeds to fall in love with Nicole's character, Gerry. Most of the movie is taken up by him following her around, and her telling him she's not interested (but not why), and then he gets entangled in a big violent chase, as the girls' criminal pasts catch up with them.

This probably sounds dull and confusing, and it is, not least because it's all that happens in the movie. Things take forever to unfold, and yet somehow nothing is ever fleshed out. The three sisters never have a conversation that tells us anything about their personalities -- all their lines are questions, answers, orders or points of information. The script tries to use some of Gerry and Daniel's exchanges to compare the revolutionaries of the 1960s with the unchanging working class, but nothing much is made of this theme, because "Honest" does not give us a convincing re-creation of its time. It doesn't so much take place in the 60s as in one of those "Austin Powers"-style pieces of production design overkill that pretend to be the 60s by teeming with joints, psychedelic polka-dot clothes, people saying "Far out!" and hit songs blasting out of every radio.

Lazy critics will blame the failure of this movie on the All Saints, or on the director, the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, who are all musicians making their film debuts. But it's not their fault that they can't make sense of a script in which nothing happens for long stretches, and there is no real focus for anything, or reason for the period setting. It's not that I wasn't paying attention -- I watched "Honest" so attentively that I even noticed the in-jokes on the road signs of the sets.

COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani Please visit, and encourage others to visit, the UK Critic's website at http://members.aol.com/ukcritic

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