Theatre critics, like cowboys, seem to fascinate filmmakers. All About Eve (1950) is remembered almost as much for George Sanders’s portrayal of an aphoristic Broadway Machiavel, Addison DeWitt, as for Bette Davis’s performance as a falling star. David Niven appeared as an academic turned drama critic in a rather tame comedy, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), chiefly memorable for prompting John Gielgud to dub Tennessee Williams’s notoriously cannibalistic Suddenly Last Summer ‘Please Don’t Eat the Pansies’. Critic’s Choice (1963) is a farce in which Bob Hope, playing a critic forced to review his wife’s play, is at one point seen dangling ignominiously from a theatre balcony. In Theatre of Blood (1973), the London critics are gruesomely murdered, in appropriately Shakespearean fashion, by a vindictive old ham played by Vincent Price. It is almost as if the cinema, dependent upon but curiously resentful of the theatre, were seeking its own humiliation upon the stage’s presumptuous arbiters.

The Critic, written by Patrick Marber, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton, returns to this terrain. Marber’s screenplay is loosely based on Curtain Call, a very good novel by Anthony Quinn published in 2015, in which a painter and his actress lover face a moral dilemma after accidentally stumbling on an attempted murder: how can they inform the police of it without revealing their adulterous tryst? The novel, set in 1936, contains a rich portrait of a boisterous, life-loving, gay theatre critic, Jimmy Erskine. Erskine is closely modelled on James Agate, who ruled the roost at the Sunday Times from 1923 to 1947 and published nine volumes of compulsively readable diaries under the title Ego.

Marber has shifted the action to 1934, which means we get reminders of the threat posed by Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and of the period’s punitive sexual laws but not the background drama of the abdication crisis and the Crystal Palace fire, both of which feature in the book. Erskine becomes the pivotal figure of the story, though he is largely shorn of his redeeming qualities. In the film, his paper’s new proprietor, Viscount Brooke, urges him to tone down his vitriolic reviews (‘More beauty, less beast’) and takes a dim view of what a colleague terms his ‘sexual proclivities’. So when Erskine is picked up by the police for public indecency, he is given a month’s notice. At this point, Erskine offers a deal to an actress, Nina Land, whom he has constantly attacked. If she agrees to sleep with Brooke, who is besotted with her, he will give her good reviews for life. He will also acquire power over Brooke that will guarantee his future at the paper.

Marber initially creates a perfectly plausible picture of Erskine’s life as an overnight critic on a popular daily. We see the compulsive note-taking during a performance, the frantic rush to the exit on curtain fall, the reliance on an amanuensis to type up the review and the arguments with the night editor over obscure words. All this rings true, as does Erskine’s need for release through food, drink and sex.

But the film falls apart once Erskine makes his dubious bargain with Nina. If I pin the blame on Marber, it is because I subscribe to Gore Vidal’s theory that the writer is the ultimate creative force in the movies. For a start, there is the absurd proposition that a critic who has been vituperative about Nina’s performance as the heroine of The White Devil (‘her death is akin to a deflated dirigible’) would twelve days later go into lyrical rhapsodies over her representation of Olivia in Twelfth Night. Critics have been known to change their minds (Kenneth Tynan did an extravagant turnaround on Harold Pinter, lauding The Caretaker to the skies having brusquely despatched The Birthday Party, and I was equally dismissive of Pinter’s Betrayal at its premiere in 1978 but readily acknowledged my initial myopia when I saw it revived thirteen years later). Confronted by Erskine’s sudden volte-face over an actress he has consistently abused, however, the audience will smell a rat.

Implicit in Marber’s screenplay is also the idea that Erskine’s use of blackmail can be explained, if not justified, by his social circumstances. As a gay man and a public figure, Erskine faces constant risks. He even shows a certain courage when, accosted by fascist thugs, he turns their enquiries about his sexuality against them. But the fact that Erskine is subject to oppressive laws is hardly a justification for the action he takes. Wouldn’t a potential target of blackmail on account of his homosexuality in fact be hesitant about using sex to extort his employer?

What distinction the film has comes chiefly from its actors. McKellen invests the fedora-hatted Erskine, who is plausibly rude to people who ask his opinion of a play at the interval, with a jaunty defiance and astutely mimics Kenneth Tynan’s habit of holding a cigarette between the middle fingers of his right hand. But the best moment of his performance – and the entire film – comes in a short scene in which he thinks he has lost his job. McKellen precisely registers the sense of desolation a critic confronts on realising that neither their presence nor their deathless prose will ever again be required.

Arterton beautifully conveys the desperation of an actress craving acceptance from a critic whom she has grown up reading. Mark Strong, by doing very little except shrug the occasional eyebrow, is impressive as the viscount quietly nursing an erotic obsession. But the minor parts are thinly written, leaving excellent actors, such as Lesley Manville as Nina’s intrusive mother and Alfred Enoch as Erskine’s loyal secretary, to make bricks with minimal straw. Anand Tucker directs efficiently, giving the action a distinctly noirish feel. But for all the talent on display, the film dwindles into murderous implausibility and, in its portrayal of the mutual dependence between a corrupt critic and an ambitious actress, arouses faint echoes of a far better movie. This is not so much All About Eve as All About Evil.