Monday Movie: It's A Wonderful Afterlife by @destroytheearth

It is always applaudable when ethnic minorities are addressed; particularly when it is the minority group themselves doing the addressing. However, good intentions cannot disguise the multitude of sins that It's A Wonderful Afterlife unleashes on the screen.

The film's opening gambit is a Se7en pastiche, where an unseen killer forces a man to eat a curry at knife point; a curry so hot it causes the man's stomach to explode all over the A&E room he is taken to. This Fast Show-esque buffoonery is a sorry sign of things to come.

The "Curry Killer" continues to strike, particularly against those who wrong young Roopi, the single daughter of an Indian widow resident to the Southall area of London. Through a contrived series of circumstances, the ghosts of the Killer's five victims unite to help said widow marry off her daughter, hopefully to a local copper who is torn between his love of Roopi and his ambition to please his bosses who consider her the prime suspect. If you think this sounds confused and overcooked, then you need to be made aware that this is nothing compared to the sheer insanity of this film.

The pacing makes the story feel like it is being told by a toddler: "this happened, and then this happened, AND THEN this happened, and then there was a dinosaur...!" Not really... but it would not be out of place in this confused mess.

The film's saving grace is that it has an amazing cast that reads like a who's who of English Asian actors: there's Jimi Mistry, the dashing Sendhil Ramamurthy from Heroes, Sanjeev Bhaskar from Goodness Gracious Me and even her from Eastenders at the minute; ably backed up by Mark Addy from The Full Monty, Happy-Go-Lucky Sally Hawkins and My Family and Harry Potter's  Zoë Wanamaker... not that any of them have anything to do... Nevertheless, they all appear to be having a simply marvellous time, so much so that they forget to offer anything for the audience.



It's not that this is a completely awful film, it's not even that memorable, but if Bollywood wants to enter the mainstream then it needs more than this sub-Carry On rubbish to do so.