Pierce Brosnan returns to the country of his birth to star in the true-life story of Desmond Doyle – a drunken, out of work painter-decorator in 1950s Ireland – whose wife walks out on him (for some inexplicable reason). Unfortunately for Desmond, it’s 1953, and due to a legal loophole, the law doesn’t permit single fathers to raise children, preferring to send such charges into the, eh, loving paws of the Catholic Church.

Hence, our hero finds himself locked in a seemingly impossible battle against a sinister conspiracy between Church and State. Still, he’s a defiant sort, and in order to win back his sons and daughter Evelyn, he enlists assorted lawyers (among them Quinn and Rea) and finds a shoulder to sober up on in the form of an attractive barmaid (Marguilies).

This may be a film about the stranglehold that the Catholic Church once held the State in, but Evelyn isn’t in the same league as something like The Magdalene Sisters. Indeed the nuns here seem to have more in common with the singing, skipping variety found in The Sound Of Music, rather than the frightful tyrants of Peter Mullan’s film.

The film has much deeper problems, though. It relies on the most hackneyed devices (courtroom applause, cutesy kids) in its attempts to deliver an emotional punch. The tone is desperately uneven, lurching from broad physical comedy to melodrama, frequently within the same frame. Worst of all though, are the Oirish accents. Collectively they have to constitute the least convincing bunch of dialects since Tom and Nicole signed up for Far And Away. In particular, Brosnan’s rendition of Dublinese is terrifying, bizzarrely lapsing into something approximating a bad Jimmy Cagney impersonation on more than one occasion.

Unquestionably, Evelyn’s heart is in the right place, but the Doyles’ tale deserved more than the twee treatment it recieves here.