When is anyone going to properly appreciate what critics have to go through?

The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it did sound as if it had all the makings of an entertaining and nicely savage little film. But through a surfeit of plot, it rather loses the plot, and the result is a surprisingly bland melodrama with the small-screen feel of one of those Agatha Christies the BBC forces upon us every Christmas.

It’s a pity, as critics don’t often make it on to the cinema screen, unlike war reporters. War reporters, war reporters, why is it always war reporters when I have to sit through a film each week that may be boring? When is anyone going to properly appreciate what we go through?

This is loosely based on Anthony Quinn’s novel, Curtain Call, and is directed by Anand Tucker from a screenplay by Patrick Marber. It’s set in London in the 1930s with McKellen playing Jimmy Erskine, who is the drama critic for the Daily Chronicle. He is a figure like James Agate (the inspiration for Curtain Call) or Kenneth Tynan as he can make or break a production even if his prose, from what we see of it, does seem plain unpleasant rather than either especially witty or insightful. (‘Hold your breath as you pass the Duke of York’s for here is untreated theatrical sewage,’ begins one of his reviews.)

But now the proprietor, Lord Something-Or-Other, has died and his son (Mark Strong) is in the driving seat. He wants to create a kinder newspaper and needs to make economies but Jimmy, who is arrogant and vain, is sure his job is safe. ‘They won’t come after the old guard,’ he tells the opera critic as they get sloshed over lunch at their club.