Question: What are Imelda Staunton, (“Harry Potter,” “Vera Drake”) Celia Imrie, (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) Timothy Spall (“Mr. Turner,” “Secrets and Lies,” “The Party,”) three of Britain’s money making older film citizens, doing floundering about and offering such hammy tricks in something so dreadful as “Finding Your Feet”?

These top money Brits have, as you can see, given their best in some much better films. Are all of the UK’s better writers working in TV now?

Didn’t any of them ask themselves:

“Didn’t Judi Dench and Bill Nighy turn this down?” Of course they did.

As they are all too good to trash, no matter what they’re doing, I’ll get right to the heart of the problem — the script and direction.

Here’s the story:

Staunton as Sandra, a snippy, mid-60’s wife of a British Lord, finds her hubby in the wine cellar with her best friend. She packs up, leaves her well-groomed mansion, and moves in with her sister Bif (Imrie), an aging hippy from the long ago days of antiwar marches and free love. Bif never moved up in the world, and lives in a seriously cluttered public housing unit in a forgotten part of London.

Bif smokes weed, and despite her age and illness, sleeps with the occasional stray from her “dancing group.”

So here we have a sisterly odd couple bunched together in what appears to be a large laundry hamper.

Of course, Bif brings her sis into the dance group, that, with all respect, looks like the assisted living misfits. They turn out to be, individually, cute and cuddly misfits.

Here, Sandra meets Charlie (Spall), a handyman fix-it friend, who lives on a rundown houseboat on an unidentified river. Charlie, we learn, had to sell his home when his wife, suffering from Alzheimers, was hospitalized.

Of course, the weekly dance group is chock full of seniors who, with a bit of a struggle, emerge — surprise? — as gifted and talented, as though they all came from the same high school production of “Grease.”

Their sponsor gets them a gig which blows up into a dance contest in, wait for it, Rome, which of course, they win in the big finale.

That show, to be fair, is kind of cute, even lavishly produced, as though it had been rehearsed for years. The audience loves it, gives it a standing ovation, and we move on to the following tragedies that follow.

While the 111 minutes drag on, Sandra and Charlie fall in love, but break up because Sandra thought his wife was dead.

“You lied to me,” she squeaks.

Surely they will fall back together when that problem is solved by two or three deaths in the group. Don’t ask. It’s a bad script that clearly grew out of a bad hit British sit-com.

The script, so full of cliches and holes so big it resembles a piece of discarded Chantilly lace, was directed by someone called Richard Loncraine (“Wimbledon” “Firewall”).

I will admit to a couple of moments that some softer hearts will find touching. They are offered by dear Celia Imrie and Tim Spall in two tear drawing scenes. That’s about it. You can, of course, see it and decide for yourself. I can only end by quoting a current meme — “There is no excuse for elder abuse.”

J.P. Devine, of Waterville, is a former stage and film actor.

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