THE BAKER - hokey cokey pig in a pokey!

Milo is a hitman on the lam in a Welsh village. The locals presume he's the new baker and Milo's all to happy to swap his Glock for an apron and stave off his mid-life crisis. Problem is, the locals soon twig what he really does for a living and start commissioning him to kill their irritating neighbours. Milo still thinks they're ordering "cake". So proceeds a comedy of errors that is painfully executed. Writer-director Gareth Lewis never moves beyond the obvious - exploding Welsh sheep, garden gnomes - and always crosses the line from silly to plain stupid. The classic example of this is a scene where our (anti-)hero Milo (Damian Lewis) and his love interest Rhiannon make love smeared in flour, eggs and cocoa powder. Unsexy and, what's worse, not hugely funny.

We've seen hitmen turn soft before. This territory is covered better in THE MATADOR. Even ANALYSE THIS makes a better fist of it. Fish-out-of-water comedy has been done better too. But the most tragic thing about this movie is that it seems to ignore all the development in British comedy over past decade, not least by the genius TV series THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN. In that phenomenonally successful show, the comedians moved beyond the crude stereotypes used by Lewis. They satirised the urban view of rural life as well as pushing those stereotypes to their logical and grotesque conclusions. By contrast, THE BAKER seems very old-fashioned and unambitious.

THE BAKER is on release in the UK but is also available on DVD.