Show us a film featuring the majestic melodies of Sigur Rós, and we’ll show you a filmmaker who’s farming out his dramatic responsibilities. The Icelandic rock outfit makes music so epic and sweeping – so cinematic – that it tends to overwhelm any imagery it accompanies. Cameron Crowe, who famously filmed John Cusack blaring Peter Gabriel on a boom box and made Tiny Dancer a sing-along staple, isn’t the first filmmaker we’d expect to leech off the autopilot grandeur of these angelic art-rockers.

Yet here’s We Bought a Zoo, his adaptation of Benjamin Mee’s best-selling memoir, about a family man (Matt Damon, charismatic in everydude mode) who moves with his two children to the titular grounds after his wife dies. Crowe has made good movies (Almost Famous) and bad ones (Elizabethtown), but he’s never made anything as work-for-hire impersonal as this quasi-uplifting family drama. That may explain why the lifelong music lover is suddenly outsourcing playlist duties – not to mention emotional heavy lifting – to Jónsi and his bandmates.

The laziness extends beyond the soundtrack. The zoo itself, situated on a giant country estate and populated by various eccentric employees, seems to sprawl without boundaries. By contrast, the film’s plot – in which Damon’s grieving widower juggles familial tensions, a budding love interest (Scarlett Johansson’s zookeeper) and the renovation of the property – is impossibly tidy. By the climax, Crowe has surrendered control to the house band; the film might have ended with lions mauling the whole family, and we’d still be bobbing our heads to the inspirational strains of Hoppípolla.

AA Dowd

Dir Cameron Crowe, category I, 123 mins, opens Dec 29