Starring James McAvoy, Steven Robertson, and Romola Garai. Rated PG.

This film seems fated to attract faint praise the way that fuzzy sweaters draw lint.

There is, for instance, no denying the worthiness of the subject matter. The physically challenged rarely get to appear on-screen, so the prominence of two protagonists, one of whom suffers from Duchenne dystrophy and the other from cerebral palsy, in Rory O'Shea Was Here can only be applauded. It also cannot be denied that scenarists Jeffrey Caine and Christian O'Reilly have written a number of funny lines while indulging only moderately in mawkishness and sentimentality. The acting is likewise rather good, with James Mc?Avoy pumping a good deal of life into the mobile two fingers and mocking mouth of Rory O'Shea, the spiky-haired rebel who befriends the more privileged but incomprehensible Michael Connolly (Steven Robertson), the cast-off son of a distinguished Dublin barrister. Brenda Fricker plays against type in the role of Eileen, the domineering den mother who rules her home for the disabled with a castratingly firm caress.

On the other hand, there is no avoiding the depressingly obvious paint-by-numbers unfolding of the low-concept plot. Director Damien O'Donnell's determination to cross My Left Foot with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is all too obvious, as is his eagerness to dampen the tear ducts in our feel-good/feel-bad heads.

In addition, there are significant problems with the "look" of this film. On the one hand, the streets of Ireland's capital city are made to look as unattractive as possible while, unnervingly, the background colleens are made to appear so impossibly gorgeous they make even Hollywood's most bodacious high-school corridor look like the female barracks in a 1950s' vintage Bulgarian tractor farm.

Of course, this lack of aesthetic control could be easily forgiven if Rory O'Shea Was Here were more memorable. Unfortunately, it isn't. For if there's nothing particularly wrong with this film, there's nothing particularly right with it either.