Will

Every so often, a film comes along which is so misguided as to be almost admirable. The tale of a 12-year-old orphan (Perry Eagleton) who heads off across Europe to attend the Champions League Final, ‘Will’ tries so teeth-grindingly hard to be a twinkly, family-friendly fairy tale that it becomes intensely overbearing, abandoning sense and subtlety in favour of blunt religious symbolism, join-the-dots scripting and some of the crudest attempts at emotional manipulation ever committed to film. Everything about ‘Will’ – from a phlegm-drowningly scouse Damian Lewis to perplexed, robot-puppet cameos from Kenny Dalglish and Jamie Carragher, from the logic-bothering absence of border controls to a constant, weird conflation of football and Christianity – just feels wildly wrong. The effect is like being manhandled by a rouged, sherry-fumed elderly relative under the mistletoe: the intentions may be good but the execution is sloppy – and the end result is unsettling and inappropriate.