Half-baked comedy 'Dough' fails to rise

The title "Dough" offers a double meaning in John Goldschmidt's stylistically unstable culture-clash comedy about an old-school Jewish baker, curmudgeonly widower Nat Dayan (Jonathan Pryce), whose faltering finances force him to take on a kneady Muslim teenager, Ayyash (Jerome Holder), as his apprentice.

So, Nat Dayan deals in dough in a movie all about monetary dough (not brotherly love, tolerance or mutual respect) that provides London's multicultural masses with a reason to bond and find common ground.

Ayyash has only taken this job as a front for his real vocation: a marijuana and hashish dealer.

About 35 minutes of dullingly earnest exposition pass before "Dough" finally mixes things up when the cops come to the bakery, forcing a panicked Ayyash to dump his stash into a giant mixer bowl.

Suddenly, Dayan's Bakery becomes a huge success with patrons lined up around the block, demanding more baked goods. This really makes neighboring merchant Sam Cotton (Philip Davis) mad. He wanted to force Nat into a buyout.

When Cotton gets the goods on what's going on, Nat and Ayyash must join forces to stage a "Mission: Impossible" raid on his office to find and eliminate the weedy evidence.

This is the stuff of sheer sitcom, yet Goldschmidt makes "Dough" a half-baked comedy that avoids going to the zany, crisply edited level of nuttiness the material demands.

Pauline Collins is wasted (not from weed) in her thin role as Joanna, a lonely businesswoman whose offers for a merger bounce off Pryce's humor-challenged Nat.

Holder becomes the movie's most valuable player. He's a young actor charismatic and comfortable before a camera, a character capable of creating a commanding combo of comedy and conflict.