St Vincent
Director: Theodore Melfi
Cast: Bill Murray, Jaeden Lieberher, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts, Chris O'Dowd, Terrence Howard, Kimberly Quinn, Dario Barosso, Donna Mitchell
Rating: (M)
Four stars (out of five)
It is the sort of tosh the Victorians loved, and during the Depression Shirley Temple made a fortune playing the winsome child.
We may think we are of sterner stuff with all our hip irony, but there are still plenty of films that use aspects of the sentimental format even if they cover it with industrial levels of bad behaviour from the grown-up.
So if St Vincent is as predictable as a comic book movie why is it still worth seeing?
The answer is entirely in the casting: Bill Murray doing Bill Murray is always worth it.
Here he gets to play against a child who is winsome.
Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) and his mum Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) move next door to Murray's messed-up loner Vincent.
Their life is not that together either and when Vincent offers to babysit Oliver it seems to make sense to the stressed-out Maggie.
What she does not realise is that Vincent is a barfly who likes to go to the track and keeps company with Russian prostitute Daka (an unrecognisable Naomi Watts).
Vincent's influence on Oliver is a disaster except it sort of isn't.
We have to go through a number of twists to to find out Vincent's biggest secret, the one that makes his financial irresponsibility understandable, but no matter how random the journey becomes Murray makes the detours worth it.
- Christine Powley
