Guy X review

Saul Metzstein's second feature - after the well-received Late Night Shopping in 2001 - is a comedy drama based on John Griesemer's novel 'No One Thinks of Greenland', and to be honest it's hard to find many films set in the country where the sun shines continually for six months of the year before plunging into darkness for the remaining half. The unusual locale is probably Guy X's main selling point as it is a soldier's saga which suffers from comparisons to MASH, Catch-22 or more recently Buffalo Soldiers.

The story centres on Rudy Pruance (Jason Biggs), a lowly grunt in the US Army who at the beginning of the film is literally dumped out of a cargo plane only to find himself in the middle of the nowhere that is Greenland. It's 1979 on the army base that time forgot and the Cold War is at its height. Full of expectedly quirky soldiers - rejects and oddities to a man - the base is run by the authoritarian Colonel Woolwrap (Jeremy Northam), obsessed by both his need persuade communications officer Biggs to edit a weekly newspaper as well as his comely assistant Irene (Natascha McElhone).

Things start to get awkward for Rudy when he falls for his boss's secretary, and life on the base takes a distinctly unnerving turn when he discovers that in fact it is home to a rather unusual military secret.

The tone of the film changes considerably once this secret is revealed, and this is one of the chief problems: it doesn't know whether it wants to be a comedy, drama, thriller or love story, and fails to approach being any of the four. This could be down to a problem at the script or editing stage. Certainly the actors do their best: it's the situation we find them in that is never quite believable.

Wetzstein shows some skill in directing individual scenes, but at times delivers an incoherent final product that is muddied by its ever-changing tone, and begins to drag way before the end is in sight. As a result it will struggle to set the box office alight.

Paul Hurley