Sir Richard Attenborough’s wrinkly weepie Closing the Ring is about as exciting as the entertainment on a SAGA cruise ship.

Ethel (Shirley MacLaine) is far from upset to be burying her husband because throughout her marriage she was in love with someone else. Wallowing in self-pity she has little sympathy for her grieving daughter Marie (Neve Campbell), while vodka helps her fantasise of what could have been.

When she was a young girl (Mischa Barton) during WW2 she promised to love Teddy (Stephen Amell, who has starred in the US version of Queer As Folk and the gay soap Dante's Cove) until the day she died and Teddy made his friend Chuck (David Alpay) promise to look after her if anything happened to him. It does. He dies and Ethel and Chuck embark on a loveless marriage.

Their other buddie Jack (Gregory Smith) would have happily played the cuckolded husband if he’d been asked. As the elderly Christopher Plummer he still might have a chance with sour old Ethel.

Jack’s cause is assisted in the unlikely place of Northern Ireland when a ring Ethel sent to her one true love is dug up by Quinlan (Pete Postlethwaite) and Jimmy (Martin McCann) excavating the area where Teddy’s plane was shot down during the war.

As if all this melodrama weren’t enough Jimmy is being bullied by both the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries, meaning there are simply too many stories running through this mawkish whingefest.

Back and forth we go between the 1990s and the 1940s and the US and Ireland (twee Irish music announces we’ve arrived at the Emerald Isle as if we’re not capable of working that out for ourselves).

Attenborough would have done better if he’d concentrated on one era only. The regretful characters of the present day show little resemblance to the beautiful young things of the 1940s and there’s not enough time to emotionally invest in any of the characters. MacLaine/Barton’s Ethel manages to be selfish, disagreeable and tiresome despite having three men in love with her at the same time. I had no sympathy for her.

At the risk of sounding like Mr Skin you do get to see Barton’s knockers amidst all the schmultz and not because they’ve accidentally fallen out of her designer dress either.

Closing The Ring opens in the UK on 28 December 2007

Want more? Then buy Starstruck: A Hollywood Saga and delve into the closeted world of homo Hollywood. Fabulous. Buy it online and save some money to put towards Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film and Gay Hollywood: Over 75 Years of Male Homosexuality in the Movies.