On A Clear Day: Critic Reviews

[Scottish actor Peter Mullan] saves a drama tangled in the seaweed of life lessons from drowning in pathos.

Set in and around the dockyards of Glasgow, On a Clear Day follows a laid-off shipbuilder who decides to fix his life by swimming the English Channel.

Does any of this work? Sure, but only through the graces of a cast that knows better than to play to our hearts.

Gaby Dellal's cynically mushy film, like The Full Monty and its ilk, is best savored only by its target demo: middle-classers who see one imported film a year.

If it weren't for Scotsman Peter Mullan, who's wonderful as Frank Redmond, On a Clear Day would be intolerably pat.

A lesser film, kindhearted, a wee bit weepy and a wee bit trite.

It presses most of the right feel-good buttons.

Nothing in On a Clear Day is especially compelling. The movie doesn't dig deep enough.

Like a soggy and less compelling iteration of The Full Monty.

The symbolism in On a Clear Day makes it more than just another underdog story, and the movie is less reliant on warm and fuzzy Hollywood- isms than other films of its kind.

Dellal milks the funny business for maximum laughs without making any of the central characters devolve into caricatures.

The recent Anthony Hopkins film The World's Fastest Indian, a charming true story loaded with nutty details, painted a similar picture of an older man's quest, but with much brighter colors than the gray tones of On a Clear Day.

The recycled spectacle of yet another downsized U.K. working-class type being reduced to an act of feel-good against-all-odds crowd-pleasing redemption.

The wonder here, if not the redemption, is that so many toil so hard to make this saccharine stuff palatable.

The kind of drama that British television used to do so well, a well-constructed, smartly observed story of ordinary people learning how to communicate with one another.

A thoughtful, thoroughly engaging portrait of fractured family and friends pulling together for an impossible dream.

Sweet-natured, if somewhat familiar, On a Clear Day features fine performances by Mullan, Blethyn and Sives. Dellal and cinematographer David Johnson paint an inviting picture of Glasgow.

A satisfying 92 minutes.

There is much warmth and reconciliation in the final act, indicative of the movie's goodheartedness.

On a Clear Day isn't so much a bad film as it is a thoroughly familiar and unnecessary one.

There's an audience for this sort of mush, but don't count me in the mix.

One thing that sets On a Clear Day apart from other, like-minded films -- besides its spectacular Scottish location footage -- is the first-rate cast.

Unlike my colleagues, I wiped my eyes instead of rolling them, and I'm hoping you will too. Worth seeing indeed.

Flawed by moments of sitcom humour, On A Clear Day still manages to tell an engaging story about men, work and friendship.