REVIEW: 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen' is Either Wet or Dry

Odds are, if you watched Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, you're either tooth-ached with it's benign approach or twitched due to overdose of the same thing. I, for one, was kind of stuck in the middle, because I instantaneously was engrossed by its charm, but instantaneously pulled back with its shortcomings. The pic, based from a novel I didn't know existed (by author Paul Torday), is either unconscious or very much aware when it stretches to run on its silly plot, that concerns a fisheries-expert Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), who is contacted by a Brit-representative, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt, Looper) of a Middle-Eastern sort-of rich philanthropist on a quest to import British-bred salmons to the mountains of Yemen.

The objective was silly enough, but it draws the attention of people, acquiring the support of a relatively big politician and his publicity assistant Bridget Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), who will soon drop their help. It's easy to understand that the job won't be done too easily, but Jones, Chetwode Talbot and the sheikh (Amr Waked) pursues the fifty-million Brit-pound project anyway. This plot as you can see, is alike with the ridiculous premise, but director Lasse Hallstrom does his humanistic approach, and the next thing you realize, was that this don't really matter to you anymore. The leads of course added much contribution to make this movie embraceable. Blunt, whose charm perfectly complements McGregor's is the bestselling aspect of the film; with Thomas as an addition, you're held no choice but to give up and swoon over (and yes, I'm admitting).

Hallstrom knows what he does best and he uses it no less. Instead of pursuing political satire, that would have given better opportunities to the film anyway, he went with his quirky and cute approach which worked efficiently anyway. He tends to be arty, but not too much and he tends to be emotional, but not as well too much. He becomes this fulcrum of a see-saw, perfectly agreeing with physics and keeping the mechanism to function like how it is expected to function: to draw unexpected smiles in the audience's faces.

Fishing in the Yemen, arguably a movie that could have gone further, exactly like its title ("Salmon Fishing in The Yemen", who thought of this title, anyway?). Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor is here to make amends with that issue, but silliness, the kind that merges with the atmosphere of the film throughout, is a bit hard to forget. Odds are, is it good or otherwise, the answer's in you. B