In the words of Kent Brockman, news anchor on The Simpsons: "democracy doesn't work". Faintheart, which bills itself as the world's first user-generated movie, is a middling sitcom that could have crawled fully formed from the head of a jaded TV executive. Instead, the film was "produced by the MySpace community", with users encouraged to vote on the director and contribute to the script. It stars Eddie Marsan as a small-town loser whose love of war games and battle re-enactments has caused no end of problems on the domestic front. His son is being bullied at school, his wife (Jessica Hynes) has shacked up with a slimy games teacher, and our cowardly lion must now try to win her back. Even if you didn't have a hand in the script, you can probably guess where it goes from here.
This is not a bad movie, exactly, but it aims curiously low, and is faintly pointless; and while the actors cope well with the material, they are finally just cardboard characters in a balsa-wood plot. This, it must be noted, is partly our fault. We were at least offered the chance to shape these characters, construct that plot, and make this picture. But we fumbled it. We stink. Two stars for the lot of us.