They are not the caricatures of a "sick" underclass, but a decent family struggling to cope.
Greg Kinnear is good, as always, in a characteristic role of a decent man struggling to locate the truth.
When Russian forces kill Georgian civilians, the film is unsparing in its depiction of their brutality; when Georgian soldiers fight back, the cartoonish explosions make for pure entertainment.Underneath the nonsense, though, is a decent film struggling to emerge.
Judging from the polls and anecdotal evidence, he is seen as a decent man struggling to deal with a series of calamitous acts of God the 2004 tsunami hit just after he took office.
"Danny Dyer has become the byword for low-budget, no-quality Brit-trash cinema," wrote one reviewer in 2010, "but beneath the cockney swagger there's a decent actor struggling to get out".
The constant is Mannix, whose predicament that of a decent guy struggling to keep numerous plates spinning in the face of larger, unpredictable forces recalls that which troubled Larry Gopnik, the protagonist of A Serious Man, a bleak comedy that transposed the Old Testament narrative of Job to the Minnesota suburbs of the 1960s.
There's a half-decent EP struggling to be heard here, but when set beside the likes of Old Friends/New War – a baffling grab-bag of pitchshifted vocals, rhythmic heavy breathing, choppy digitised guitar and a sung "emo" chorus – the only thing Refused are in danger of provoking is embarrassed laughter.
The players are decent individually but struggle as a unit.
A decent British cast struggle with mud and terrible dialogue, and the heroine has to masturbate while wearing a chastity belt.
Even when they had decent numbers, executives struggled to manage their mutinous staff.
