The Parole Officer

Steve Coogan – better known to all as TV’s Alan Partridge – has graduated to silver-screen with this light but appealing knockabout comedy/thriller, which manages to be a lot of fun in spite of its ridiculous narrative and cheapo British Lottery origins. It’s unlikely to be all that widely remembered in five years’ time, but The Parole Officer comes as a welcome antidote to the recent avalanche of sentimental Britflick crap, and certainly beats the likes of Bean hands down.

It’s Coogan himself, of course, who provides the primary source of mirth in what would otherwise be a forgettable affair. His character here, hapless Blackpool social worker Simon Garden, is more or less another Partridge with the obnoxious smarminess toned down slightly: he’s a thoroughly useless nonentity, transferred to be a parole officer in Manchester thanks to his dire track record of three successful cases, who becomes unwittingly embroiled in a murder case when he witnesses the murder of a dodgy accountant, executed with spectacular cold-bloodedness by bent cop DI Burton (a magnificently exaggerated Stephen Dillane) while an unseen Garden munches as quietly as possible on a packet of crisps.

The gormless Garden gets framed for the murder, and can only prove his innocence by breaking into a bank and stealing the CCTV footage on which the proof of his innocence is stored: therefore, he’s forced to rope in all three of his ex-clients and implore them to return to criminal ways. A chaotic but frequently amusing knockabout caper ensues, with Garden distinguishing himself by vomiting on kids in the middle of a rollercoaster ride and much in the way of similar madness: it all culminates in an extended bank-heist payoff which verges on the hair-raising.

Flashes of black humour here and there don’t quite take away from the good-natured breeziness of the whole affair, and Garden himself is almost enough to make you pine for the

sequel. It won’t take box-offices by storm, but in an age where Brtitflicks are becoming more frequent and more awful at a rate of knots, Coogan’s self-conscious looniness comes as sorely-needed relief.

Throwaway, lightweight, ludicrous and effortlessly likeable.