There are some very non-Love Island male bodies on display in this likably daft British comedy with echoes of The Full Monty and Brassed Off. We get refreshingly unselfconscious moobs and guts, sagging thighs and fading tattoos, belonging to guys sporting unsexy swimming caps and goggles. All that’s lacking is a verruca plaster floating in the foot baths.
It’s about a group of miscellaneous middle-aged blokes who form a deeply unlikely male synchronised swimming team, revolving around the local pool in various interlinked formations to musical accompaniment. But they’re making no creative progress. That’s until accountant Eric (Rob Brydon), suffering from a midlife crisis and bobbing disconsolately in the shallow end, joins their ranks. His numeric training tells him they need an extra man to complete the rotational symmetry – and his heart tells him he personally needs some therapeutic bonding.
Jane Horrocks plays his exasperated wife Heather. On the team itself, the always excellent Jim Carter is a sensitive widower; Rupert Graves is a smoothie divorced real estate salesman secretly in love with a female synchro star who works at the pool (Charlotte Riley); Thomas Turgoose is a youngster in trouble with the police; Adeel Akhtar is the squad cynic; and Daniel Mays is a quick-tempered guy with a secret anxiety problem.
Screenwriter Aschlin Ditta has loosely based it on the 2010 documentary Men Who Swim, about a real-life synchro-swim team of middle-aged Swedes. That non-fiction film may also have inspired a recent French film starring Mathieu Amalric entitled Le Grand Bain, or Sink Or Swim, with almost exactly the same premise. It’s always amiable and silly, with the same goofy theme of building a better life through amateur showbusiness as those British male ensemble dramedies of the 90s, though with less politically at stake.
This film floats, but, like a synchro-swimmer doing the “egg beater” leg movement, it needs a fair bit of strenuous activity to keep it upright.