There's an outside chance that this looked promising at the pitch stage but any misgivings should have been heeded. It's fairly clear that someone involved, either the writers, who pitched it to a production company or a producer who subsequently hired writers, saw Regis Warniers Est-Ouest - a drama in which a French woman, Sandrine Bonnaire, married to a Russian doctor, Oleg Menshikov, accompanies him to Russia in 1946 against her better judgment, is terribly unhappy there and escapes - and Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin - a comedy in which a dedicated Communist, Katrin Sals, living in East Germany, falls into a coma shortly before the 'Wall' comes down, wakens some time afterward but cannot be told she is now in the WEST lest she suffers a heart attack - and decided a combination of the two would surely clean up at the Box Office (both films were highly praised and garnered several nominations) and then delivered a film that is neither funny or dramatic. Alternatively, someone concerned saw The Lives Of Others at the beginning of the year and dashed off Ratcliffe in about ten days. If ideas were all it took then I myself and probably half of you out there would be millionaires many times over but as we all know ideas need a little back-up, like talent, ability, competence. Iain Glen is a very fine stage actor but doesn't have the best record when it comes to picking films, similarly Catherine Tate is also a fine stage actress and an equally fine writer and comedienne - it was in fact her name that 'sold' this movie to me - so the two leads tick all the boxes where talent, ability and competence are concerned. The two writers are something else, Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have only one previous credit, Sixty Six, which again they wrote in tandem and which sunk without trace. The premise is simple: a dedicated communist living in 1960s Yorkshire, applies, without consulting his family - wife, brother-in-law, two daughters, for a teaching post in what was then 'East' Germany. Having been offered the post - teaching English Literature - he proposes that they move en masse and meets surprisingly little or no resistance, no worries about leaving friends behind, changing schools, etc, in other words, unrealistic. The regime they encounter is strangely benign and although the Stasi is acknowledged - indeed both Mr Ratcliffe and his youngest daughter are soon on the payroll as it were - it is an equally benign outfit and no one is actually tortured/killed as a result of information obtained. There is absolutely zero chemistry between Glenn and Tate (who becomes quite adept at escape) so that we are unable to work up much of a sweat about their eventual reconciliation. This should have gone straight to video thence to oblivion.