Goddess

There are no prizes for guessing what will be the main draw to this glossy Mark Lamprell musical as Ronan Keating makes his acting debut alongside the Kelly Brook look-a-like Laura Kelly. An interesting find when studying the press notes for this piece is the revelation that it was actually made and released worldwide in 2011, but failed to gain any mainstream attention.

The tone of the picture is firmly in place from the outset, when Kelly’s character Elspeth is shown standing on a sweeping hilltop about to burst into song before shouting at her toddlers for attempting to eat poo; unfortunately this is as ‘funny’ as it gets. The story centres around Elspeth and her struggle in being a stay-at-home mum with high ambitions of becoming a singer. Meanwhile, her husband James (Keating) is focused on his career as a whale watcher (I’m being serious). The plot develops with Elspeth’s rise as an online singing sensation in a world that is so divorced from reality it had to have been written by a Disney-addicted teenager for a drama GCSE project. Although the film is just three years old the out-dated technology within the plot makes it seem much older. The best example being Elspeth’s ridiculous treatment of a basic webcam as if it was a complex magical object. The enthralment shown by her wide-ranging online audience is hilariously surreal as clearly the director has never heard of the perils of Chatroulette.

The so-called jokes are more predictable than the result of an England world cup game and although the songs have a small degree of charm, they are pretty much instantly forgettable as Kelly’s impressive vocal range is nothing close to being well utilised. The scenes at the family home in the outback of Australia are so coma-inducing that it leaves the audience begging for a surprise serial-killer to appear and put everyone out of their misery.

Although the focus may be on Keating, the truth is there’s not really enough of him on screen to make a fair assessment of his acting ability. His most memorable contribution comes in the final scenes – and not for the right reasons – as he achieves the impressive feat of generating a room full of laughter from a sequence that was supposed to be sincere. Even the scene of the children throwing tantrums and screeching in a supermarket isn’t as painful as this movie. 

Keir Smith

Goddess is released nationwide on 4^th July 2014. 

Watch the trailer for Goddess here: