Released internationally as The Revengers' Comedies, Malcolm Mowbray's Sweet Revenge follows in the footsteps of Throw Momma From The Train in offering a darkly comic variation on Strangers On A Train. Mowbray, director of the acclaimed A Formal Affair as well as the less-loved Steve Guttenberg-Shelley Long cancer comedy Don't Tell Her It's Me, adapted Alan Ayckbourn's plays for this film version, which casts Sam Neill and Helena Bonham Carter as mismatched losers who meet on a bridge while contemplating suicide. The straitlaced Neill desperately wants revenge on the grinning jackass who stole his job, while Carter has her sights set on destroying Kristin Scott Thomas, the wife of a boorish former lover. Realizing that they don't have much to live for, the would-be suicide victims plot revenge on each other's enemies, a process complicated by Neill's growing affection for Thomas. Madcap shenanigans ensue, but, like many theater-derived farces, Sweet Revenge doesn't translate smoothly or successfully from stage to screen. Labored when it should feel effortless and prone to jarring stops and starts when it should roll along smoothly, Sweet Revenge seldom works for more than a scene at a time. A lack of momentum hurts the film immeasurably, but its biggest liability turns out to be its conception of Carter, a garden-variety aristocratic kook whose behavior and motivation changes from scene to scene to suit the needs of the convoluted plot. Neill fares better, proving himself a deft and capable straight man, but Sweet Revenge flounders when he's off-screen, degenerating into strained farce and brittle misanthropy. The subplot involving Carter's sabotage of Neill's professional usurper is an irritating distraction at best, hitting its nadir during a scene where an asthma inhaler is withheld from a dying man. (Oddly enough, it's nearly identical to a bit in Nora Ephron's execrable Lucky Numbers.) A moment in which a frilly-shirt-wearing Neill attempts to maintain his dignity and carry on a conversation while a pack of dogs sniffs hungrily at his crotch is a minor masterpiece of comic humiliation, but Sweet Revenge as a whole feels curiously lifeless and remote.