STONE OF DESTINY (Charles Martin Smith). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (February 20). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Stone Of Destiny is one of those movies that reimagine actual historical events as dopey, naive clichés.
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In 1950, a quartet of Glaswegian students plotted to give their dispirited fellow nationalists a morale boost by stealing the Stone of Destiny – a large slab used in Scotland’s coronations – from Westminster Abbey and bringing it back home.
This simple caper premise becomes a long, hard slog thanks to writer/director Charles Martin Smith’s TV-movie sensibility, which reduces every sequence to a flurry of declarative statements, clumsy compositions and anachronistic music choices.
For a while, it’s pleasant enough to watch Charlie Cox and Kate Mara skulk around London casing the joint, but then Robert Carlyle shows up as actual Scots politician John MacCormick to deliver a couple of pointless pep talks while wry housekeeper Brenda Fricker looks on approvingly.
There’s a term for this sort of thing, isn’t there? Oh, right: bollocks.
