When Stanley Kubrick made Barry Lyndon, probably the director's most overlooked film, he went to painful lengths to re-create his 18th-century setting, using period clothes instead of costumes and forgoing traditional cinematic lighting techniques in favor of lamps and candles. About 10 minutes into Plunkett & Macleane, also set in the 18th century, a character who sounds like nothing so much as a modern-day soccer hooligan or aging punk rocker growls the line, "Surrender's for wankers," establishing early on that the film won't follow in Kubrick's footsteps. Not that it would have to—and it's not the essentially respectable production design or anachronisms that betray it—but it didn't have to be this bad. Trainspotting alums Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller play a pair of mismatched hard-luckers, one (Carlyle) an apothecary-turned-criminal, the other (Miller) a destitute playboy. Together, they achieve fame and fortune as masked bandits until, in great buddy-movie tradition, a woman (Liv Tyler) complicates matters. Unpleasant, virtually humorless, and endlessly self-satisfied, Plunkett & Macleane lacks all the criteria it needs to be the high-spirited adventure film it clearly aspires to be. In his feature-film debut, music-video director Jake Scott (the son of Ridley Scott and director of R.E.M.'s Fellini-copping "Everybody Hurts" clip) shows that he can successfully fuse the anaesthetic qualities of a BBC literary adaptation with the vacuousness of MTV at its worst. (A scene in which Miller and Carlyle rob a banquet—for apparently no reason, fireworks explode behind them during their escape—is particularly objectionable.) Carlyle and Miller seem at a loss for what to do, while Tyler just seems lost. The film might have been better had it featured a lot more of the lively Alan Cumming as a debauched, androgynous nobleman. But it doesn't, and every scene without him (and even most of those with him) collapses in a heap.