The Legend of Barney Thomson is the directorial debut of actor Robert Carlyle, and it’s one of those black comedies about a serial killer in which, as the bodies pile up, plausibility edges closer and closer to the window until it flies out completely. (No. Wait. Come back! I’ll massage your feet!) This wouldn’t, in fact, matter at all if there were something else to hang onto; if the characters were involving, or the story was told with wit, zip and panache, but it just monotonously drones on. The central figure is a barber so I guess you could say this is Sweeney Plod rather than, you know, that other one.
Set in Glasgow, and based on Douglas Lindsay’s comic crime novel The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson, Carlyle stars as Barney; Barney the barber, who lives a life of desperate mediocrity — he says so himself in one of those first-person voice-overs — and who has suffered demotion after demotion at work. You have no chat, no banter, you hang over clients like ‘a haunted tree’, his boss complains and, to be fair, his boss has a point, as this Barney has no charm whatsoever, and if you wouldn’t wish to get your hair cut by him, why you would wish to buy a cinema ticket and spend 96 minutes in his company is anyone’s guess. Eventually, his boss fires him, at which point Barney accidentally kills him with a pair of scissors. Oops. But at least there is no blood to mop up. Clean as a whistle that barbershop floor, after the event. This is when plausibility first starts edging towards the window. (No! Wait! I’ll be your slave for a week!)
Matters get yet more complicated, as a serial killer is on the loose; a killer who sends his victims’ body parts back to loved ones in the post.
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