Pedestrian crossing.

There's a moment early on into Cemetery Junction, the first big-screen collaborative offering from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, where one of the characters remarks that another should stop listening to "poofs like Vaughn Williams" (straight) and put on "some Elton John" (less straight, but this is 1973 after all) instead. That's about as sharp as the gags get here - winking "oh it's so ironic" nods to stuff that seemed almost innocent back then - house prices; dinner-table racism; sexual politics. Unfortunately, they're handled with all the subtlety of a brick.

Let's put aside my ire at the hypocrisy of Gervais two years ago dismissing the British film industry - only to reappear after two commercial flops with his first British feature. It's hard to find the "glorious England" Gervais has been flapping his mouth about during his promotion of Cemetery Junction - his depiction of early-70s Reading is neither the bleak landscape his characters seem so desperate to escape from; nor is it wholly the rose-tinted nostalgic lane that its (admittedly fabulous) soundtrack suggests.

Instead, our three protagonists (The Handsome One; The Angry One; The Dorky One) mill around, perpetrating such minor offences as a couple of bar brawls and painting a cock on a billboard. The central hook is that The Handsome One - having somehow wangled a job as an insurance salesman - suffers a rude awakening upon realising that the idyllic life of his superiors might not be for him, and that instead his heart lies alongside the adventurous fantasies of The Boss's Daughter (who is, in turn, engaged to A Bit Of A Prick).

Character names are irrelevant here - everyone is painted with such broad archetypal strokes from the get-go that literally nothing surprising happens for the duration. If you've seen even a couple of movies in your lifetime, then you can plot out every single arc within the first five minutes. Cemetery Junction is, sadly, that predictable. That's not to say the movie doesn't hold a few charms - there's an inspired sing-a-long to Slade at a corporate function; and the central trio make for a believable (if dull) little clique.

Gervais and Merchant clearly want this film to be Reading's answer to Barry Levinson's Diner, or any other number of "we've gotta get out of this place" pictures of that ilk. Unfortunately, the obstacles presented to the main characters seem almost inconsequential - a key plot thread that's been slowly building throughout is simply ignored come the climax - that it's hard to really care. They're all gainfully employed; they're reasonably successful with the ladies; and even the local bobby seems to like them. They're hardly struggling from the outset.

Performance-wise, nobody really rises above adequate (and with a cast supported by the likes of Ralph Fiennes and Matthew Goode, that's not good enough), with one brilliant, shining exception - Emily Watson. Delivering more emotional nuance in a single glance than the rest of the cast can muster for the duration, she's tragically underused - but when she gets her moments, she uses them to once again prove she's one of the greatest, most oft-underrated actress working today.

Gervais and Merchant have bragged ceaselessly about how many movie offers they've turned down since finishing up Extras. It's a shame, then, that the one project they chose to go with feels more like a Screen One drama (with some added use of the word "cunt") than anything as cinematic as they'd hoped to deliver. Must try harder.