Lasse Hallstrom marginally clears the mediocrity bar with Salmon Fishing in Yemen (2012)

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It would be a little harsh to label Lasse Hallstrom the paragon of Oscarbait mediocrity but he's not too far off. His films often are overconfident in their ability to turn a hooky premise -- a free-spirited woman introducing chocolate to a repressed town, a drifter caring for a mentally ill brother, an engineer moving salmon to the desert, a young man raised by an abortion wizard -- into an uplifting narrative. With the exception of Cider Housr Rules, where all the elements came together to make a very solid film, a lot of his films feel overmanufacutred on sentimentality and manipulative with the musical score.

Salmon Fishing in Yemen is not as bad as the most saccharine of the director's offerings at its most predictable moments and its surprisingly pleasant on the whole.

Ewan McGregor plays a doctor, Alfred Jones, who is recruited by a shiekh's emissary (Emily Blunt) for a ridiculous task and McGregor is firmly against the idea. Blunt's character, Hillary, is a woman who comes prepared with the art of persuasion and she slowly wears him down. It's the kind of initial resistance one would see in a screw ball comedy but a nice feature of the film's first act is that Dr. Jones is firmly in the category of married man at the start of the film. It's a purely professional banter and it's a chemistry between two strong personalities that keeps the film interesting.

The film has some major twists in terms of the wants and needs of each of the two characters towards one another. Hillary deals with a tragedy and the film almost gets tonally jarring to the point of distraction but, with the exception of one scene (which carelessly throws around a possible mental illness on the part of Jones), it maintains course.

As the two begin to move past a relationship of colleaguedom and develop romantic feelings for each other, the film takes a slow pace with a development that feels organic. 

With such a strong relationship between the leads, the background can feel superfluous and it doesn't help that little of it is well-developed. There's a terrorist plot that's laughably underdeveloped and a Sheikh character (Amr Waked) who doesn't register on the whole. At least Kristin Scott Thomas makes a strong impression as a foil of sorts who's fast on her feet (although I honestly didn't understand the details of her plot on first viewing).

On the whole, McGregor and Blunt transcend the material and make this one of Hallstrom's  better outings.