Venus (15) <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

When all else fails, get the pensioners to swear. That's what Judi Dench did in Mrs Henderson Presents, and Julie Walters turned the air blue in last year's Driving Lessons.

Now it's Peter O'Toole and Leslie Phillips as a couple of elderly actors swapping prescription pills and four-letter words in Roger Michell's Venus, a meditation on old age and "the only end of age", as Philip Larkin put it.

O'Toole plays Maurice, a former matinee idol reduced to a dodderer, though a twinkle returns to his eye when Phillips's disobliging grand-niece Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) comes to stay in London.

The old roué and thee young lass strike up a friendship that seems to have more love than lechery in it, although, unfortunately, Hanif Kureishi's script fails to develop what is a promising situation into an involving story - we see what's in it for Maurice, but not what the attraction for the much younger woman might be.

One or two lines hit the mark: at a fringe play that they have gone to see, Jessie mistakes the interval for the end. "It's never the end when you go to the theatre", opines Maurice, wearily.

O'Toole and Phillips are both fine as the rheumy-eyed partners in dotage, but they're ill-served by a screenplay that feels patched-up and sluggish with medications.