Who doesn’t love Fisherman’s Friends? The 2019 feelgood Brit-com about sea shanties and Cornish pluck, written by Nick Moorcroft, was so successful, making £8.6 million on a shoestring budget, that the film-makers essentially made the same movie again in 2022, this time calling it Fisherman’s Friends: One and All. That one, alas, was not half as successful (£3.5 million).

Never mind. Moorcroft and co, like the scrappy stars of their jaunty yarns, are built of sterner stuff and they’ve remade Fisherman’s Friends one more time — only now it seems as if they’ve asked a large-language model AI to rewrite the screenplay but to replace “sea shanty” with “beer” and “recording contract” with “beer-making licence”.

So off we go again, to a small impoverished English town, this one in Somerset instead of Cornwall, where a group of mostly penniless and disenfranchised lads are in desperate need of a focus, a talent, a skill — anything — that will bring them together, teach them that life is worth living and send them up to “that London” for a climactic and financially rewarding finale. Hmm. Anyone tried beer making?

It stars Jonno Davies, who played the CGI monkey version of Robbie Williams in A Better Man. Good for him. The supporting cast includes Mark Addy, talisman of The Full Monty, James Buckley from The Inbetweeners and Gabriella Wilde (Tatler magazine’s “second most eligible girl in Britain”, 2007) as the completely disposable love interest.

It’s full of telegraphed “comedy”, ersatz emotions and daytime telly twists. Please, marketing people, stop calling these films “Ealing-style comedies”. Ealing made dangerous, audacious films such as The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets. This barely qualifies as content.

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So why two stars? Because it’s inoffensive and criticising it feels like punching down. And because Martin Clunes, playing a grouchy landlord, is really quite good.
★★☆☆☆
12A, 93min
In cinemas

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