Criminal Ways

There are a lot of awful films made around the world this year. In 2003, "The Wannabes" stands shoulder to shoulder with the worst.

A pathetic film that tried to cover too many comedy concepts and failed through all of them.

"Angry" would be the emotion I felt after seeing this film. Why? Because Film Victoria was a financial backer of this film, so, as an Australian taxpayer, I have contributed money to rubbish.

A glance of the cover of "The Wannabes" in the video store was enough to confirm this film would be rubbish. I wasn't so stupid to actually hire it, but did waste two hours of my life watching it on free to air TV.

While Nick Giannopoulos and his friends proved successful in Melbourne with theatre such as "Wogs Out of Work" and the TV series "Acropolis Now", the idea has well and truly run out of steam. And yet Giannopoulos continues to peddle the same concepts in production after production.

Film Victoria, the Film Finance Corporation and any other Australian film funding body would be highly irresponsible to finance any more projects by this production team.

In fact, I've just emailed the Melbourne Film Office with "do not finance" plea to any further Nick Giannopoulos projects. I urge you to do the same.

The only positive thing about this film is that it did employ a production crew, so kept food on the table for a couple of dozen Victorians. Perhaps that was the basis for the MFO giving it the funding go ahead. But, it probably made those crew make mental notes to never produce a lame film like this themselves.

Can I be any more frank? I think the only amusing thing about this film is reading the scathing reviews on IMDb about it.

Clever scripting, well crafted characters, side splitting humour & wonderful acting....you will find ABSOLUTELY NONE of those qualities within the pathetic & smutty film "THE WANNABES" !!

After the local success of his last film, "THE WOG BOY", comedian (?)Nick Giannopoulos has fallen into the trap of thinking his audience would swallow anything he made, and this poorly executed & terribly acted attempt at comedy is full of immature toilet humour and lame jokes that make you grit your teeth in pain.

The turgid script concerns a bunch of low brow criminals who enlist the aid of a third rate actor to create a Wiggles / Teletubbies type childrens act as a cover for a series of heists. The film just lurches from one painful scene to another as it sinks to the depths of boredom & stupidity, and I can see this film destined to end up in two places...(a) On the IMDB Bottom 100 film listing, and (b), In the $1.00 a week dump bin at your local video library.

Steer well clear of this giant lemon !!

Why do I hate this film? Here we go. 1. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it raises a faint smile a maximum of THREE times. All other attempts at humour are failures, and really obvious failures. 2. It features Russell Dykstra, who was fantastic in Soft Fruit. Even in this crap, you can see that he's talented, but who is ever going to take him on after he's been tainted by this excrement? 3. It's sexist. 4. It's racist. 5. It's homophobic. 6. It relies on a "cute" kid, who delivers his lines with all the plausibility of a hatstand, and for some reason calls undies "jocks," though he's supposed to be Australian. 7. It sets out to satirise the Wiggles, but is so feeble that any Wiggles video would outdo it easily in the wit stakes. 8. It has a cameo by Bert Newton. 9. It has a cameo by Rove McManus. 10. Rove McManus! And there was no warning on the cover, or before the film.

Hi! someone said non-australians wouldn't probably like it. maybe i have spent enough time in Australia but my boyfriend and I saw it up in Darwin and it was his first time in Australia. while it was not high brow intellectual humor, I thought it was hilarious and my boyfriend had a few chuckles as well. I thought it was silly and funny how it made fun of how a lot of kids stuff is really pretty dumb. At least that is how I felt when I was a kid and saw a clown or something (if I wasn't actually scared of the clown/mime, I felt them to be "talking" down to me). The Wiggles are big over here now and now I always think of this movie when I think of them although I believe this film was supposed to not have any sort of connection or reference to them.

After seeing this abuse, I can't help but be sorry for the money I spent to see the Wannabes. Nick G has been believing that he can't fail. I can assure anyone reading this, he has failed.

Someone has to let him know.

He failed to engage me in the characters, he failed to make be believe the events and he even failed to follow the simple rules of story telling.

This flick is for no one, too crude for tots and too stupid for adults. There is nothing in this film for anyone.

The slight nod to an international audience was even a debilitation to the movie, and God knows what anyone should think of The Australian Film Industry if this crud gets seen abroad.

A total embarrassment.