Joseph Fiennes' dashing good looks and charisma played a major role in making 1998's Shakespeare In Love and Elizabeth critical and commercial hits, but the actor has been surprisingly unable to capitalize on those ostensibly star-making turns. In 1999, Forever Mine inexplicably cast filmdom's sexiest Shakespeare as a suspiciously over-aged cabana boy, while 2000's Rancid Aluminum finds him taking a thankless role as a duplicitous schemer out to sabotage the life and career of coworker and best friend Rhys Ifans. In a sharp break from his scene-stealing turns in Notting Hill and Human Nature, Ifans plays the film's sexually irresistible protagonist. While such unconventional casting might have paid off in a better film, here it works against both actors' strengths. As the film's put-upon lead, Ifans makes for a frustratingly generic Euro-slacker, while Fiennes is reduced to glowering handsomely in the background. An unholy mix of Mickey Blue Eyes, Snatch, and the Gene Wilder fertility comedy Funny About Love, Aluminum casts Ifans as a sex- and drug-crazed suspended adolescent left in charge of the family business following his father's death. Desperate for money to keep the company afloat, Ifans agrees to enter into a Fiennes-masterminded business deal with a group of deranged Russian mobsters, but the situation is complicated by his attempts to impregnate girlfriend Sadie Frost and the none-too-subtle advances of the head Russian mobster's fertility-obsessed daughter. A film with a profound identity crisis, Rancid Aluminum feels like three movies at once, none of them promising. The first is a weak drama about a man attempting to come to terms with adulthood, the second a dark thriller about backstabbing in the business world, and the third and least promising a shrill fish-out-of-water comedy about a hapless Englishman mixing it up with crazy mobsters. As a result, Rancid Aluminum flits nervously among its three main threads without finding a consistent or even bearable tone. Throughout the film, Ifans' facile hedonist expresses an apparently sincere desire to move beyond the empty pleasures of youth and assume the responsibilities of adulthood. Rancid Aluminum, on the other hand, seems content to splash about mindlessly in a shallow pool of bratty adolescent attitude.