Churchill: The Hollywood Years

I have to admit that I didn't expect to like this movie but actually it was a pleasant surprise. I think the fact that some of the dialogue clunked terribly added to the humour. The premise is ridiculous, yes, but it is so for a reason. The people making this film don't expect you to take it seriously, it's not a history lesson. The film delights in sending up stock Hollywood clichés, the token black guy, the Americans saving the world etc, and I would suggest it as a tonic to anyone who had just endured "Hollywood history" dross like Pearl Harbour or U-571. The script contains some cracking one-liners and there is a pretty great British cast. Having Hitler to stay at the palace is an inspired piece of comic invention and the story with the princess parodies Mel Gibson's Braveheart sub-plot quite hilariously The absurdity of the movie is what saves it, if they had gone and made a half hearted effort it would never have gotten to film. Give it a go.

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.

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.

For a long time now, Hollywood have overblown things, messed with facts and just generally not been all that honest with what has made it to the screen.. You can imagine then, the producers of Churchill - The Hollywood Years sat around thinking of ways to play with this idea. Making a send-up of Hollywood by casting Christian Slater as William Churchill must have seemed like a grand idea, and after seeing the trailer I was very much all for it...but it's safe to say that the film has missed the mark, and all Churchill - The Hollywood Years really is, is a bottom drawer action spoof with very little in the way of redeeming features or funny ideas. The film basically has one running joke, which is never good for a film; but it's especially rubbish when you realise that this joke isn't even capitalised on to the extent that it could have been. The film seems to be happy to just rely on giggles rather than big laughs, and only about half of these giggles work; and only about a quarter of the ones that work garner any kind of substantial laugh factor. This film isn't exactly sidesplitting.

One thing that definitely is to this movie's credit is the casting of Christian Slater in the lead role. Slater has made a lot of rubbish lately, and while this film isn't good; at least he's good in it. Slater gives Winston Churchill just the right essence of the standard 'American hero' and seeing him "kick butt" is always a pleasure. Well...it would be if the action sequences weren't so tacky. It's more local theatre than Hollywood. One miscasting is Neve Campbell as the queen of Britain. I'm a fan of Neve, and liked her a lot in the likes of 'Scream' and 'Wild Things', but here she just makes a fool of herself. Her British accent is stupid in the extreme and her performance isn't convincing at all. Like many British productions, this one has hired just about every British comedian going for various roles, and this doesn't do the film any favours in my opinion. Their caricatures are largely unfunny and it's obvious that they're only in the film so that they've got something to do. It's a huge shame that this film isn't very good as it could have been a nice little parody. Oh well.

The conceit: Winston Churchill was actually an American action hero and Adolf Hitler was about to marry then-Princess Elizabeth (against her will, of course; she was still alive when this was made and the filmmakers didn't want to wind up in the Tower).

Good: Anthony Sher has some delightful moments as Hitler.

Good: Neve Campbell is a (too) lovely, gung-ho Elizabeth.

Good: This movie has a few good laughs. Such as the pilot who flew Hitler into England. Hey, I laughed out loud at the clutch incident; and, having seen too many World War II movies, I enjoyed what they did with the table where they moved ships and things around (I'm no expert on the period: did such tables actually exist? And why?)

Good: Miranda Richardson made an intriguing, entertaining Eva and as for the portrait of Princess Margaret . . . What satire? And I loved the dog.

Otherwise, this flick amounts to "Carry On, Adolf and Eva." All it lacks are the nasal intonations of Kenneth Wiliams and the whisky-barrel laughs of Sid James.

Except that Williams and James had more genuine talent than most of those assembled here beneath the top tier of actors.

It's difficult to describe the good parts without giving away the few laughs in this one-note affair, which amounts to a sketch (or perhaps no more than a howlingly funny Kentucky Fried Theater trailer/commercial) stretched out like chewing gum to movie length . . . Well, the version I saw was, mercifully, lasted little more than an hour and a quarter and I thought I'd have to gnaw my own leg off to free myself.

Personal digression: though I was a poor boy in a small southern American town I grew up in the 1970s on a diet of P. G Wodehouse and Monty Python and the Goodies and Peter Sellers. Later on life, thanks to the Internet, I enjoyed the Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour, I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and The Burkiss Way. I bought a region-free DVD player solely to watch little English movies starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, George Cole, Alistair Sim, Eric Barker and the self-same Leslie Phillips who makes a total, irredeemable (donkey) of himself in this . . . (to quote Adolf) . . . Thing.

British readers will know what I'm talking about: as with American comedy, I only care for the cream of British humor and, while I've endured worse, this is fairly close to the dregs. It starts out funny (enough) but quickly peters out. Here and there the humor shines, but most of it just is.

At rock bottom, all failed comedy may be traced to the same root cause: the writing. This movie has a roster of writers who should have known better. Perhaps, as a writer myself (I won't divulge under what name), I have too much imagination but I can see them in a little room as on "The Dick van Dyke Show" (and I bring up van Dyke for a reason, but I can't say why) snickering to themselves like schoolboys who scrawl dirty words on walls. They've forgotten the cardinal rule of writing: "good enough" isn't good enough. Especially where comedy is concerned. They should've rewritten it again and again.

And again.

If all else failed, they might've added more dogs.