Considering that we're talking about Danny Boyle as director here, I would expect just that, yet to my surprise, in the long run, Boyle's direction feels relatively under-inspired. Basically, the problem with Hodge's story structure is that it suffers from a kind of "and then" type of flow, in that it slam-bangs everything together with little grace, little evenness and little spark, thus making for a script that may not be as bad as I make it sound, let alone as bad as others make it sound, yet seriously needs to be executed well. Of course, when you get down to it, what might be the biggest problem with Hodge's script is that the story it's built around is rather bland, with a limited sense of consequence and bite, made all the worse by bumpy flow in the structure of such a story, which sometimes slapdashes exposition, sometimes collapses into tonal unevenness, falls into story unevenness on more than a few occasions and often plummets to unsubtlety to make the final product even more predictable. Being about as much a dark comedy as a romantic comedy, the film isn't quite as cheesy as you would expect, yet at the same time, Hodge slips up more than you'd expect when it comes to avoiding more than a few cheesy occasions, which are, like many other faults in the script, made worse by the characters, almost all of whom feel exaggerated to one degree or another, with some - particularly, of all people, our leads - feeling obnoxious to the point of almost being unlikable, and decidedly to the point of being barely compelling. There's one point in the film in which Ewan McGregor's Robert Lewis character says during a bank robbery that you can see a clip of in the trailer, "I thought we agreed no cliches", which is ironic, for although this film isn't quite as cliched as I had feared, it plummets into more than a few of the tropes found within films of this type, so much so that it's pretty easy to predict the outcome to this film, and that lands a heavy blow to the final product, yet the writing faults don't end there, because even with his reasonably strong writing in preceding Danny Boyle films, John Hodge often delvers on surprisingly underwhelming dialogue that fails to sparkle, and sometimes even gets to be a bit weak, or rather, a touch cheesy. Either way, the point is that this film is a generally enjoyable one, or at least to me, yet it goes held back by oh so much. Ouch, sounds like that joke stands to be "a joke less cheesy". Granted, again, I like this film just fine, but make no mistake, this does stand to be "a film less cheesy". In "Shallow Grave", friendships died over murder and in "Trainspotting", friendships died over drug addiction, but in the film business, nothing kills friendships quite like bad movies. Lord knows Ewan McGregor wasn't going to stick around after this, which is a shame - seeing as how he and Boyle made a good team - and a bit ironic, seeing as how the films McGregor and Boyle did together were about losing friends. I like the film just fine, but how bad do the reviews on your film have to be for your cinematographer to stop hanging out with you? No, I seriously doubt that Brian Tufano broke his relationship with Danny Boyle over this film's bad reviews, partially because Tufano doesn't have too many more people to work with other than Boyle, but this film was pretty much the beginning of the end for Boyle and his group of friends.