If you are Canadian, or know someone who is Canadian, or can spell the word H-o-c-k-e-y, you may already be familiar with the legend of Corner Gas, that great opus which begat this movie.
Once upon a time, deep in the bowels of the Canuck entertainment industry (an industry which owes its very existence to the exchange rate with the US dollar; and which can claim to have spawned over 90% of all the bad sequels made in the last 30 years) a fairly unknown but undeniably clever comic pitched an idea for a Canadian-ish Seinfeld ("Seinfeld without the nasty edge") and not only was it accepted, it was an international hit.
Even as you read these words, on some comedy channel somewhere in the digital world, Corner Gas is running, and, like Lucy, may run long after the rest of us have shuffled off this mortal coil.
The team behind GAS left the party while the getting was good, and tried a bunch of spinoffs. The fact that you never heard of the spinoffs pretty much answers your next 2 questions.
Which left only one option -- recapture the glory days by bringing the whole team back into harness for a feature.
And here we are.
It's actually hard to review because -- and this is fatal for a critic -- I know the series too well, and that means I am reacting to my memory of the characters as much as the characters themselves, in the movie.
So, bottom line, if you are fan of the original, there are worse ways to spend a rainy afternoon than with Brent and boys. And the incredibly photogenic Gabrielle Miller doesn't hurt either.
However, as raw entertainment, there are problems. The script is massively overwritten. You get the feeling that every time writer A noticed a problem, writer B would try to plaster over it with a clever pun or a segue. With the expected result.
None of which changes the fact that it is meandering, overlong, uneven, and poorly meshed to the feature-length format.
That's my view as a critic.
As a fan, however, it was great fun to see the gang back in action again!
