Churchill: The Hollywood Years

Great idea - overplayed in places, but still enjoyable.

If they'd have been a bit more subtle in places they'd have made a better film. Performances of Neve Campbell as Princess Elizabeth and Phil Cornwall as Martin Boreman (with a great east-end accent) really stand out. Pity they didn't have time to develop some of the supporting roles especially the irish cockney of Mackenzie Crook and Miranda Richardson as Eva Braun

One to look back on laugh. Just wish they could do a sequel but in reverse - the British all action hero Churchill saving America from the Communist threat !

I'd had this sat on my shelf for a while having bought it as part of a job lot of DVDs. But I was pleasantly surprised.

The film is much more clever than it seems with several in jokes and knowing nods to those who know there 'Comic Strip' and also enjoy taking the mickey out of jingoism, of any nation. To those who don't get that this is a satire more than a parody, note the way that 'Churchill' delivers the Enigma machine to Lord W'ruff within one of the first few scenes.

So it's not rip roaring - so what ? If you want the same old re-heated jokes then the Scary Movie franchise is probably more up your street. This is more the Pete Richardson of 'The Strike' or 'GLC'. It's brave of film producers to throw money at this kind of production, rather than letting it fall to TV and have to make compromises. The money is on the screen. It's a good time film.

For me Reeves and Mortimer play perfectly to form in their hammy cameos. Slater gets the joke and takes a leaf from Charlie Sheen and the Hot Shots movie. The only disappointment is that Miranda Richardson is so under used.

Not a popcorn film for the modern world of MTV and Big Brother, but certainly one worth watching just the once as a balance against the Michael Bay whore fests such Pearl Harbour or Armageddon.

The Hollywood version of the American involvement in World War II starts with the arrival in the Isle of Mann, sorry, England, of American soldier Winston Churchill. Churchill has heard of the Nazi armies sweeping across Europe and is keen to help despite being met by an air of total indifference by the British, who seem to be almost welcoming Hitler into their country. Befriending Princess Elizabeth gets him in the door but with incompetence and gayness all around him, Churchill must take a stand and win this war for America!

Despite terrible reviews I decided to give this film a try and what I found was a reasonable enough comedy that just doesn't have the material to stand up to be what it tries to be. The concept is sound as it is a nice little spoof of all those films that rewrite history to sell tickets – not just an American habit by any means, but market saturation alone means they stand out as doing it the most! The joke is a good one and it does produce some intermittent laughs along the way but it really struggles to convince as a "motion picture". In fact watching it all I could thing was that this would have worked if it could have been a presentation of The Comic Strip rather than a film, because that way it could have overplayed and existed on its own terms – that heading telling the audience that things that might be considering failings are actually fine. Looking it up on IMDb later and what do I find but that this was written and directed by none other than Peter Richardson from the Comic Strip! And I think this is the problem, Richardson has come up with a good idea but he has not had the Comic Script route to go with it and as a result has had to make it into a film, where the weaknesses and dips are rather exposed. It is a shame but the end result is still quite amusing albeit it rather messy and overly ambitious.

The starry cast certainly must have hoped for more because of the volume of people go are involved, just a shame that all their individual moments tend to stand as individual moments rather than flowing together. Slater gets the tone and gives a good performance, with Campbell OK but not as into it. I think these two must have been the only people to be on the set for longer than a week because other than them the support cast is a constant state of flux. Reeves & Mortimer, Enfield, Mayall, Phillips, Crook, Day, Culshaw, Cornwell, Sally Phillips, Schneider and a few others – they are mixed but generally they are good value and it is just a shame then that the film as a whole package is not as clever nor as funny as some of the specific moments are.

Overall then this is far from being as bad as some would have you believe it is but to appreciate it you really do need to have been a fan of the Comic Strip films from years ago. The concept is good and the cast is heavy with talent but unfortunately Richardson cannot pull it all together to the degree that is required. An amusing and messy try that is fun at times.

When taken in the right spirit, this is a pretty enjoyable film, but it has its share of problems nonetheless. Sold as a parody of the way Hollywood tends to treat actual historical events, it doesn't really live up to its promises as it only occasionally does a decent job of lampooning its subject matter. When it does, it's very funny - my favourite exchange being (paraphrased) "It's up to the Americans to save the day again!", "God, I wish I was an American!". The rest of the time, though, it seems content to simply be a wacky slapstick comedy that gets its laughs from making prominent historical figures look a little ridiculous. Sometimes this works - I adored Neve Campbell's performance as Elizabeth, as well as her hilariously overdone accent... in fact she's probably the best part of the movie - but other times it doesn't, for example with Goering and Goebbels. It also has a habit of making its jokes too obvious at times, as if writer/director Peter Richardson was afraid that audiences wouldn't get it: it's not enough for Churchill's fellow GI, an African-American, to be relegated to the role of the stereotypical black comic relief character, he actually has to point this out to us.

Nonetheless, it's a fun movie, although I suspect that it will go down better with British audiences than American viewers. Provided you're not expecting sophisticated comedy or subtlety of any kind I expect you'll have fun. 7/10

One hint about "Churchill: The Hollywood Years": Ask around . . . no one's seen it. Cooler heads probably managed to mothball this seeming direct-to-airline release. (I sat through it having run out of other on-demand options during a very long flight from Asia to NYC.) The premise in an interesting one, not a good one; Hollywood producers have made a Winston Churchill bio-pic with a young American GI (Christian Slater) in the lead for the benefit of the American audience. It's hard to single out the writing, acting, or direction for criticism because the entire film seems to consist of (justified) outtakes from a movie that may have had some idea what it was doing in the comic space between "Airplane" and "The Player." The film that finally makes it on to the seatback in front of you is jaw droppingly ill-conceived.