WHO would you insist on casting in an ode to Cockney life? Michael Caine, of course. Bob Hoskins, inevitably. Ray Winstone, essential.

Australian director Fred Schepisi has signed up this A-list, and added Sixties luminaries David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay and the ever luminous Helen Mirren for an affectionate and elegiac, if staccato and leaden, account of 60 years of London living from the 1930s to the late-Eighties, adapted from Graham Swift's novel.

Three old chums (gambler Hoskins, volatile Hemmings and the laconic Courtenay) meet in an East End boozer to lament the passing of their drinking partner, Bermondsey butcher Jack Dodds (Caine). In compliance with his last orders for his ashes to be scattered at Margate, they head to the coast with Jack's son (Winstone) at the wheel. They reminisce, they re-live the happy and the sad, they open new wounds, and all the while Schepisi moves between past and present, steadily accumulating the layers of a portrait of family and friends in times of war and peace.

The flashback structure strips Last Orders of impetus but Schepisi's direction is richly detailed, the humour often vigorous, the tone more sober than the initial pub setting - and far removed from the instant morbid gratification of EastEnders.

However, the performances are uneven, Winstone's wounded turn being the pick, while Caine merely knocks off a Michael Caine caricature and David Hemmings appears to be auditioning for a Cockney version of Last (Orders) Of The Summer Wine.

Updated: 10:32 Friday, February 01, 2002