Frauds

Phil Collins as an insurance investigator? Unctuous, supercilious, insidious, Roland Copping is surely the part he was born to play. A pair of dice always in hand, he allows Lady Luck to rule his destiny - which is bad news for ill-fatedmiddle-class couple Jonathan and Beth Wheats (Weaving and Byrnes), vulnerable to blackmail after their opportunistic insurance claim. Copping tempts the couple into a spiral of defiance and defeat, his brinkmanship taking them ever closer to disaster; and as the stakes get higher, the movie gets wilder, mutating into a surreal black comedy with a brash carnivalesque tone. Copping's apartment looks like a spare set from Toys, while acute camera angles ensure that any semblance of reality is purely coincidental. But while this movie may be different, it's not that different; actually, it resembles an extended episode of The Avengers. Elliott's thesis is that all men are children at heart - and that children are malicious, vindictive beasts. It's hardly an edifying conceit, and the movie has an over-insistent, meretricious feel about it.