Review of Dean Spanley

Despite its lofty pedigree (it's based on a novel by Lord Dunsany), formidable cast and handsome period locations, this 100-minute shaggy dog story long overstays its welcome and left us feeling disappointed. The premise is that Horatio Fisk (Peter O'Toole), a cranky old gentleman in Edwardian London, is unable to mourn the death of his wife and son, the latter killed in the Boer War, or to make any emotional connection with his surviving son, a subdued Jeremy Northam, who supplies the voice-over narration. The problem turns out to be that the old man's never recovered from the loss of his beloved dog, a spaniel called Wag, when he was a boy. The younger Fisk discovers, through a lengthy investigation that takes up the first and much more involving half of the film, that an otherwise sober and uninteresting clergyman, W.A.G. Spanley (Sam Neill), when plied with a glass or three of vintage tokay, can hold an audience spellbound with his reminiscences of a previous life as a dog… I'm guessing the original tale has been brushed up a bit by veteran screenwriter Alan Sharp in accordance with contemporary notions of closure and father-son bonding, and Neill does a great job with his big scene as Wag the dog, but the film had lost momentum by that point and the attempted feel-good ending totally failed to connect with us. Neill, a part-time Kiwi, seems to have attracted some NZ Film Board funds to this admirable-in-principle but unsuccessful venture.