Chronicles of War

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.

A patchy British send-up of the way Hollywood rewrites history in favour of America.

Although I enjoyed seeing a British film sticking two fingers up to Hollywood, in the end it only, and ironically, serves to demonstrate why Hollywood has won the war in the UK box office. A ramshackle gathering of comical ideas, just about held together around the idea that Churchill wasn't a fat old British aristocrat, but was in fact a young American hero who single-handedly saves England from the Nazis, while falling in love with the future Queen of England.

But too many times the script fell foul of going for the obvious gag, or just swearing for supposed comical effect. And the action sequences were so incompetently done, looking more like something out of an episode of Dad's Army, that they didn't work as a send up of Hollywood action sequences.

Whereas Monty Python had the talents of Terry Gilliam to give their movies style, Peter Richardson is somewhat less than gifted in that department. Some of it looks good, some of it just looks cheap.

Reeves and Mortimer are tedious as usual, and you just get the feeling that most of the Brit comedians who appeared were just here to amuse themselves. This gives a pretty amateurish feel to some scenes.

Still, I laughed and I think its worth seeing, simply because it does show up the absurdity of Hollywood history.

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.

This is clearly a spoof, and therein lies its strengths and weaknesses. Overall, it's pretty funny. I recommend going to see it in a full theater, with a gang of friends out for a laugh, and with two glasses of wine or two pints inside all of you. Not more, just the two.

The jokes are plentiful, and many are sight gags, easily understood. For example, British traitor Lord W'Ruff picking up Hitler at the airport, and the entire sequence of a stalled cars, luggage, and... well, I'll skip the details so you can be surprised. But the whole 8 minutes with them is hilarious! I laughed out loud. The SS Storm Troopers in various degrees of Buckingham Palace livery is also funny, as are many other gags. A few of the gags fell flat--- such as Goehring, and Goebbels (excuse the spelling). The king was subtle and bitingly funny satire on the Monarchy. So... some gags worked, some didn't. Some required your attention, and a bit of thought, some didn't.

The weak point was the crap production values. I know it's a comedy, and part of the joy of satire and comedy is that you can do it with a low budget. Produce on a shoestring. But this movie needed a bit more than it had. They should have begged for another 5 or 10 million dollars, and brought in a bunch of CGI London blitz crowds, bombs, and something more to give it at least a veneer (even a fakey one) of the historical setting it purports to portray. Obviously, we couldn't expect "Gladiator" level cartoon graphics--- but seeing wartime London with only three actors, 4 extras, and one old lorry fell so flat that my fantasy-bone that lets me pretend and enjoy a movie was jarred and interrupted.

OK--- go see it, but be in a lightly drunk group, ready to laugh. You will laugh, and you'll have a good time. Do remember, though, that it is a S-P-O-O-F, and is supposed to be over-the-top and silly. I gave it an 8 out of 10.

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