The directorial debut of Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, I love You Phillip Morris has stirred up a fair amount of controversy on its way to the screen. Still unreleased in America despite a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival, largely because of explicit sex scenes (which, based on what’s seen in the film have presumably been cut for release, either that or this is sad indictment of the conservative nature of American distributors). Telling the remarkably true story of Steven Russell, an ex-cop, Christian, family man who after surviving a car accident decides to come out as gay - the only problem is, as he remarks ‘being gay is really expensive’ so he becomes a con man, relying on numerous fake IDs and credit cards and injuring himself for the insurance money. Which eventually loses him his boyfriend and sees him end up in jail, where he meets the Phillip Morris of the title, a pretty, effeminate man who’s impressed by Steven’s smart nature and when the two become seperated, Russell breaks out of jail (repeatedly) and lies and steals in order for the two to live happily ever after together.

Although Ficarra and Requa’s work in the past has always been gleefully un-politically correct, there is something about Phillip Morris that really leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. For a start, the film seems to merely find the fact that gay people exist hilarious and it never gets past this, with the really quite offensive term fag thrown round with abandon. This isn’t helped by the portrayals of Russell and Morris, Jim Carrey, supposedly making a return to dramatic acting as Russell instead seizes on the story as an opportunity to be his over the top worst, now with an added order of extreme campness not seen since the likes of Dick Emery, while McGregor as Morris is merely shy, softly spoken and really quite dull. It might be unfair to expect the film to make up for the generally poor portrayal of homosexuality in Hollywood, but the film’s focus on comedy comes at the expense of Russell and Morris, whose real life story is a fascinating one and which could have made a much better movie – towards the end of the film the filmmakers do make an attempt at conveying political anger in covering Russell’s rather unfair fate, by this point however it’s a case of too little, too late. Dramatically speaking there are also numerous problems with the film, such as its refusal to explain in any detail just how Russell’s whacky schemes continue to work, presumably because doing so would slow down the film’s mad-cap pacing, and instead just relying on the story’s true-life nature to keep the audience on side (the film opens with the caption ‘This really happened. It really did’). More troublesome is a mid-point foray into genuine tragedy, which although eventually integral to the plot, comes as such a jarring change of tone to the rest of the film that it’s difficult to care about.

Not every moment of comedy misses its mark, in particular the scene where Russell introduces a new inmate to prison and shows him what passes for currency in the system is delightfully cheeky, but for the most part I Love You Philip Morris is a major disappointment. Although considering that the film’s main visual motif is of a crudely drawn cock and balls, it was perhaps a mistake to expect it to have any ambitions of quality.