Matt King (George Clooney), a Honolulu lawyer and land-owner (the sole trustee of a family trust that ties up 25,000 acres worth of untouched land in Kaua'i), finds his life turned upside down when his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) is in a speedboat accident that renders her comatose.

A self-confessed "back-up parent", he struggles to know exactly what to do with 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) before jetting over to the big smoke to pick up her big sister, 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), a boarding-school student with a foul mouth and an implied booze/boys problem.

After thrashing about with his sullen oldest child, Matt ascertains that the reason Alex is stubbornly refusing to hang out with her vegetative mother is because before her accident, Elizabeth was cheating on Matt, and Alex found out. Making matters worse is the news that Elizabeth won't wake up from her coma, has a DNR clause in her will, and will die within a week or so.

That pitches them into an ill-advised plan to confront Elizabeth's lover, local real estate agent Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), that eventually also entangles Speer's wife Julie (Judy Greer).

Along for the ride is Alex's thick friend Sid (Nick Krause), and in the background, Matt's numerous cousins (the most visible of whom is Hugh, Beau Bridges) prepare to cast votes on which property developer the family should sell the Kaua'i land to.

What's a super rich dude to do? If you picked 'yell bloody murder at his comatose wife for "tormenting [him]",' then congratulations, you are one of The Descendants' screenwriters.

I'm not quite sure where to start with this, Alexander Payne's first film since 2004's similarly overrated Sideways, so I'll start at its beginning: an opening voiceover from Matt tells us that Hawaii isn't the tropical holiday paradise we've come to believe it is (quote: "Paradise can go fuck itself"). That would be fine were the voiceover not accompanied by a series of headless fatty-type shots of disabled people, homeless people, drug addicts, and basically anyone who isn't a wealthy white dude wearing boat shoes and an Aloha shirt. Hey guys, FYI Hawaii sucks since they let all these black people in wheelchairs hang out on main street!

It gets worse from there, since Matt's tale, especially when combined by the constant soundtrack of songs by Gabby Pahinui (and other Hawaiian masters), could be boiled down to something like 'Slack-Key Folk Songs Of The Hyper-Privileged White Male'.

It's true that there is the grain of a better film in the story of a rich, successful businessman who has to confront sudden emotional hardship; the problem with The Descendants is not that it explores the milieu of privileged dudes, per se (cf. many excellent Hollywood movies 1910 - present day), but that the privileged dude at its core (and, you have to wonder, perhaps the one behind the camera) seems to hate women.

Matt's daughters are alien to him: Alex is a tearaway who is drinking her way through her $35k-a-year schooling, while Scottie's delicate, burgeoning adolescence is played as a punchline (take that sand out of your bikini top, idiot!). Elizabeth, who - according to her father (Robert Forster) - was a free spirit stifled by Matt's stingyness, is in his eyes little more than an irritant, a vegetable that requires time and energy that Matt seemingly finds difficult to spare in between playing Hawaiian Edition Monopoly. When his tears come, they come late and like blood from a stone.

The only female character that approaches rounded humanity is Julie, given a compassionate reading by the ever-excellent Greer - but even she turns out to be a shrieking hysteric, unleashing tears at the hospital that see her ushered out of the room by Matt as though she were a dog that shat on the rug.

A brief and euphoric wordless prologue, featuring Elizabeth riding joyously on the boat about to deliver her fate, becomes desperately sad in retrospect when the rest of the film fills in the gaps with maudlin misogyny and quasi-deep whining about how hard it is to have so much.

After watching Clooney-as-Matt sulk his way around a drab Hawaii (which is at least given a bracingly downbeat treatment, rain-washed and rust-edged, by cinematographer Phedon Papamichael), I got a pretty good sense of why Elizabeth was planning to leave him for Brian: at least he likes women.

- two stars

The Descendants is in cinemas nationally.