Steve Coogan in The Look of Love, review Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan have colourful form as collaborators, especially on the 2002 Manchester music flick 24 Hour Party People, virtually authored as it was by Coogan's hilariously prattish voiceover. The Look of Love could, and should, have been an enjoyable companion piece to that movie, another rowdy biopic about filth, fury and changing times. Instead there's a whiff of afterthought. Coogan's impersonation of Paul Raymond, king of the Soho strip-joints and W1 property baron extraordinaire, is superficially on the money. He can pull off the externals - terrible hair, Seventies sideburns, porn-star moustache. The trouble is, when the movie wants to delve into Raymond's soul, as he sits watching taped TV interviews with his late, drug-addict daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots), the sense of strain overpowers any real ability to move us. You can almost hear the words "insert anguished close-up" every time Matt Greenhalgh's script decides to tot up the cost of excess. Coogan delivers them on cue, but there's something perfunctory and hollow at this film's core. It's sweet revenge on Raymond's whole career as a peep-show impresario that three ladies get to upstage it. Anna Friel, so often terrifically game and rarely landing the parts she deserves, is a flaming row waiting to happen as Paul's spurned wife, Jean. Tamsin Egerton injects a lot of saucy energy as the mistress he leaves her for, Men Only columnist Fiona Richmond. And Poots, ever-improving, really shows her mettle as Debbie, whose journey from downtrodden wallflower to hyper-ambitious coke fiend becomes far more interesting than her dad's rather mangy life story. Coogan has his moments, but you can see him racking his brains for ways to entertain us: he drops an impression of Sean Connery here, and a Marlon Brando one there, as if settling some old bet with Rob Brydon. Was Raymond known for his random celebrity impressions? It's symptomatic of the film's uncertainty about why we're even here, when an hour-long documentary on the man would cover all the same bases and throw us more evocatively back in time. Winterbottom never manages to spike the predictable cadence of a glitzy, champagne-toast rise then tawdry fallout - both the peaks and troughs demand the snap of Scorsese, the rampancy of Boogie Nights. British lives will never look as cool as Americans," that's for sure, but the Greenhalgh-scripted Control (2007) proved we can still make biopics that cinematically spring to life. This one, smirkily flaunting the tackiness and sheer non-movie-ness of its subject, is a bit on the flaccid side.