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Baker, TheWhen Brian Hibbard took a cappella novelties The Flying Pickets to the top of the charts in the early 1980s, little could he have dreamed that 25 years later he'd be parading about on the big screen in a leopard-skin thong.
This ghastly vision nicely sums up the rather old fashioned style of humour running through The Baker, a movie that probably imagines it's quite an edgy black comedy but comes closer to those mock thriller serials the Two Ronnies would have sandwiched between Corbett's solo joke in a chair and the closing spoof musical number.
Milo (Lewis) is a hitman who suddenly develops a conscience. With a contract now out on him, Milo hides out in a remote Welsh village assuming the mantle of local baker in order to evade fellow killer, Bjorn (Coster-Waldau).
Local numbskull Eggs (Dwyfor) discovers Milo's stash of guns and soon the whole village is in on the secret, while hoping Milo will dispose of irritating neighbours and spouses for them. The only people oblivious to this are Milo himself who believes the sudden avalanche of highly conspiratorial requests for 'a chocolate cake... for the wife' are just that, and Rhiannon (Ashfield), the one sensible inhabitant of the village and cinema's most attractive vet since Claire Danes in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines.
The laughs come from eccentric, feuding locals, a few bizarre deaths and Milo's inability to bake. With these ingredients there was an opportunity to produce a great, spiralling farce in the best tradition of Billy Wilder or Ealing Studios but writer-director Gareth Lewis (Damian's brother) doesn't seem willing to put that amount of effort in. Instead it's apparently enough that pub landlord Bryn (Speirs) quotes Shakespeare with Brian Blessed-like intensity and that the local chip shop is called 'Cod Almighty'. Oh, and Hibbard's leopard skin thong of course.
Most of the supporting cast, especially Speirs, Hibbard and Dwyfor work overtime to make their characters memorable in spite of the weak script, as do Lewis and Ashfield, rustling up something like a convincing romance to patch over the suspicion that their plotline was merely an excuse to show a naked couple thrashing about in flour and sponge cake fillings.
Quite why Milo suddenly quits his hitman duties is left pretty vague and nothing about Lewis's performance suggests a past as a ruthless killer. He's more like someone taking a sabbatical from a comfy job in advertising. Michael Gambon's cameo as Leo, Milo's string-pulling contact in the outside world, is another nice afternoon's work for the accomplished luvvie, probably cast after picking up the phone that bit faster than Peter O'Toole.
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