The Sapphires

It’s got Chris O’Dowd (This Is 40, BBC’s The IT Crowd), so that’s a start. And there’s some smooth soul music, but the Vietnam-era music flick The Sapphires feels more like a B-side than a hit single. Granted, it’s one of those B-sides you don’t mind listening to a few times, but there’s very little truly original about it, and in a genre where everything kind of hits the same notes, that’s a problem. It’s still a nice movie with some winning performances, but there’s nothing that makes it stand out. The story is kinda-sorta based on a real event, spun into the unlikely journey of a quartet of Aborigine women discovered by an eternally down-on-his-luck impresario (O’Dowd) who refashions them as a Motown-esque girl group to entertain the troops in Vietnam. It’s in the vein of stuff like The Commitments, but not as memorable.