ONE MORE KISS

Directed by Vadim Jean. Starring Valerie Edmond, Gerry Butler, James Cosmo, Valerie Gogan.

THERE'S NOTHING like a film about dying to cheer you up. Or not, as the case may be. A likeable but fairly inconsequential little meditation on love and mortality, set and shot in the bi-national smalltown of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Vadim Jean's One More Kiss is warm, sweetly-played, self-indulgent, dodgily-scripted - and far too placidly-paced for its own good. While it's a commendably honest and well-intentioned piece of film-making, I wouldn't say anybody outside the cast and crew's immediate family strictly need to go and see it.

Feisty Scots lass Sarah (Edmond) contemplates suicide on the top of an extremely high-rise New York building, before something persudes her to stick it out. She promptly returns to her Borders home in order to re-acquaint herself with widowed dad Frank (Cosmo) and ex-lover Sam (Butler): the former has remained more-or-less glued to his armchair for the best part of a decade, while the latter is now married to Charlotte (Gogan).

In the meantime, Sarah has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and the film proceeds to chronicle her attempts to plot out her final days as best as possible, while leaving time enough to to repair her relationships with the men who matter in her life.

Frank (Renton's dad from Trainspotting) is an appealingly gnarled, taciturn individual, Sam is a pleasant but deathly-dull sample of humanity - and his wife Charlotte, as far as we can gather, is an insanely jealous hellcat whose presumed redeeming features are kept out of sight.

It's all amiable enough fare, and most of the characters are fairly sympathetic - but none of them are remotely remarkable, or likely to remain long in the memory banks of all save the actors who played them. You do your best to roll along with it, but it can't escape the viewer's attention that the movie's most crucial moments - the supposedly impassioned and tear-jerking pre-death meetings and speeches - come across as merely cringeworthy, a surefire sign of pedestrian acting and incompetent direction.

If you have two spare hours to murder, you've seen everything other movie on general release, and you're desperate to view another, this will fit the bill just fine - and even if you walk in by mistake, you certainly won't find undue cause to demand a refund. But don't expect miracles, or anything close.