MRS BROWN’s BOYS D’MOVIE

Cert 15.

94 mins.

Comedy/Romance/Musical.

Starring Brendan O’Carroll, Jennifer Gibney, Eilish O’Carroll, Pat Shields, Rory Cowan, Paddy Houlihan, Danny O’Carroll, Robert Bathurst

Feisty Dublin matriarch Agnes Brown (Brendan O’Carroll) proudly runs a fruit and vegetable stall in Moore Street Market, which has been passed down through the generations.

The foul-mouthed harridan hopes daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney) will take up the mantle but a dastardly developer, PR Irwin (Dermot Crowley), intervenes with plans to bulldoze the site.

Aided by Cathy, her sons Mark (Pat Shields), Rory (Rory Cowan) and Dermot (Paddy Houlihan), and next-door neighbour Winnie (Eilish O’Carroll), Agnes resolves to take on the Irish establishment and give it a good spanking.

Dermot’s best friend Buster Brady (Danny O’Carroll), bumbling lawyer Tom Crews (Simon Delaney) and a well-to-do barrister called Maydo Archer (Robert Bathurst), who is prone to stress-related Tourette’s syndrome, pledge their support to Agnes’ seemingly hopeless cause.

Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie is a half-baked expansion of the hugely popular BBC sitcom.

Crude punchlines are depressingly predictable and the absence of a laughter track from a live studio audience exposes the script’s dearth of gags and imagination.

O’Carroll evidently subscribes to the mantra: if it isn’t funny on the page, add some profanities.

The slurry of gratuitous expletives and a repeated use of cuss words for laughs are wearying.

Aside from the large-scale musical numbers that bookmark the haphazard narrative and a pointlessly protracted chase sequence, the film has no obvious cinematic ambitions above the usual sitcom format.

A hare-brained subplot involving Mr Wang (Brendan O’Carroll again), Chinese owner of a school devoted to training blind ninjas, embraces hideous stereotypes that the malformed character might himself describe as “a rittle bit lacist”.