Beautiful Creatures (18, 88 minutes)

(18, 88 minutes)

BEAUTIFUL Creatures is the first film from the National Lottery-funded DNA, the production company newly established by producers Duncan Kenworthy and Andrew Macdonald. Between them, their past credits take in Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, Trainspotting and The Beach. The good news ends there.

Alas, Beautiful Creatures is anything but a beautiful creature, and its weak DNA can be traced to Thelma And Louise and Tarantino, newly re-located to Glasgow, where director Bill Eagles has landed himself in a mess with his clumsy collision of farcical humour and ultra-violence.

Beautiful Creatures is a peroxide-blonde version of a black-humoured female buddy movie, with Susan Lynch and Rachel Weisz cast adrift as the new economy-class Thelma and Louise.

Lynch's dog-loving Dorothy has already experienced some rough treatment on a train with her druggie boyfriend (Iain Glen) when she sees Weisz's Petula taking a beating from her gangster lover. A crow bar brings an end to that dispute but also, accidentally, to his life, and now they find themselves in trouble with the law (Alex Norton's lugubrious chancer Detective Inspector Hepburn) and the lawless in the form of the local hood.

Pairing up out of desperate circumstances, the tough, Irish Dorothy and the Monroe-dizzy Petula hatch a kidnapping scam to make a million, but a clanking combination of Simon Donald's heavy-handed screenplay and Eagles' erratic direction leave you caring not a jot whether the money comes their way. Where is the whimsy, the heart and the character detail?

Ironically, amid bent coppers, psychotic boyfriends and gargoyle gangsters, the writer and director are the worst of the man trouble for the dark, nervy Lynch and pleasingly platinum Weisz.

Not for the first time, a dog, in this case Pluto with the pink acrylic coat, has all the best lines. How depressing that the rest is doggerel.