Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Seven magazine review Ewan McGregor has always tumbled with ease into the role of romantic lead, so it's rather nice to see him compelled to work for it, as he does in Lasse Hallström's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. McGregor plays Alfred Jones, an uptight Scottish fisheries expert, who is approached by a consultant, Harriet (Emily Blunt) to help with the crackpot plan by a wealthy Yemeni Sheikh (Amr Waked) to introduce salmon to his country. The project is seized upon by the Prime Minister's press spokeswoman (a foul-mouthed, female Alastair Campbell zestfully played by Kristin Scott Thomas) as a rare example of a good news story between Britain and the Middle East, and a reluctant Dr Jones is pressured into trying to make it work. He doesn't want to, because he is busy living a quietly discontented, dull life with his high-powered wife, who talks briskly over him when he raises the possibility of children. His hair is neatly side-parted and his language fussy, but beneath it all beats a romantic heart. Then he is compelled to spend more time with Harriet - whose new soldier boyfriend has gone missing in action - and glimpses a life lived in Technicolour. McGregor has impersonated a Calvinist fusspot so well that it becomes difficult, but not impossible, to believe in the new, loosened-up version (he will, one feels, be plumping sofa cushions till the day he dies). Blunt, for her part, is attractively rather than off-puttingly posh; a game girl who plays life straight. The film has a heart of corn, right down to the Sheikh who is pitched somewhere between a visionary and a sage, and yet it all slipped down rather easily.