Directed by Noam Murro. Starring Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, Ashton Holmes, Christine Lahti. 15A cert, gen release, 95 min **
SEQUELS so rarely live up to the original. Take, for example, The Squid and the Whale II: Smart People. Every aspect of the earlier film - the academic's corduroy jacket, his offspring's pretentious gripes, his squalid romantic couplings - now seems frayed and over-familiar. Mind you, wasn't The Squid and the Whalereally a superior sequel to Wonder Boys? Perhaps up-market franchises can improve as they progress.
All of which is a way of expressing how wearyingly familiar this latest campus comedy seems. Shutter, this week's formulaic Asian horror adaptation, almost seems fresh by comparison.
Taking on a role Jack Nicholson might have chewed apart 10 years ago, Dennis Quaid appears as an English professor coping badly with life as a middle-aged widower. His dissolute, layabout brother is Thomas Haden Church's character from Sidewaysand his daughter is a Republican version of Ellen Page's character from Juno. His new girlfriend is, however, not Sarah Jessica Parker's character from Sex and the City; it is Sarah Jessica Parker's character from The Family Stone(snappy and highly strung).
The tiredness of the project would be less irritating if it did not work so hard at establishing its indie credentials. In the fifth century it may have seemed big and clever to score your movie with anaemic strummy folk rock; now it merely confirms a terrible dearth of imagination.
Still, all the actors work hard at doing what they so often do. Quaid fumes nicely, Haden Church creates a convincing boozer and - though she'd better find a new act very soon - Page slings her cynical quips around with precocious confidence.
Indeed, the cast are sufficiently good to divert attention from the dawning realisation that the film is drifting towards a conclusion that the writers of Hannah Montanamight find overly cosy. Smart Peoplebegins by stressing Quaid's despair, Haden Church's indolence and Page's cynicism. By the time the end credits arrive everybody has found a way of improving on their flaws and allowing themselves to savour the sun that shines on the leafy avenues of Indietown.
DONALD CLARKE
