Mrs. Brown's Boys D'Movie

Anyone familiar with the show will not be surprised with what to expect here. Mrs Brown's curious mixture of shock humor and sentimentality plays as easily as ever. Not hateable in its own pedestrian way and they did manage to sort of make a plot worthy of being feature length but it's hard to imagine the arts being any less rich for its non-existence.

The sequence with the ninjas gives Connor a chance to show off his versatility as an actor but it just feels bizarre.

Recommended strictly for big fans of the series.

I am a massive fan of the TV series and was really excited to hear that a movie was being made. It had some highlights but overall it was major disappointment. Sadly, much of the humour was very unoriginal or very dated (reminded me of Les Dawson) or low brow stereotyping of the Chinese and Russians that was so bad I actually cringed rather than laughed. There is something wrong when the funniest bit was the outtakes shown during the final titles.

I also found the sound track to be a bit over the top.

Guys you are better than this movie, the TV show proves this - maybe the formula simply does not port well to movies.

You know what you are going to get with Mrs Brown. Low brow silly comedy.

This is a big budget version of the television show. It has outside location shooting in Dublin rather than it all being based in a television studio. They even include some scripted corpsing.

Of course there has already been a Mrs Brown movie before. Anjelica Huston starred as Agnes Browne and directed the movie back as well back in 1999. It was more whimsical and featured Agnes Brown running her market stall.

The market stall is a plot device in this movie. Some Russians with the help of a crooked Irish politician want to close the market and build a shopping centre. Coincidentally Mrs Brown has received a tax demand running into millions of Euros.

It is all a bit far fetched and lacks the core elements of the television series which made it enjoyable and at times amusing. At one point you have people dressed up as ninjas looking for a tax receipt written in braille but it just feels dragged out.

Brendan O'Carroll has struggled to extend this for a feature film and it does stink of a cash in at a time when the BBC series was getting high ratings.

If you are, like me, a great fan of the TV series, I would advise giving this movie a wide berth. Any funny gags are predictable and very few and far between. Some of the plot lines are poor to the point of embarrassment. This has proved, once again, that British comedy rarely transfers well to the big screen. The opening song and dance routine and the closing, vomit inducing, court room speech are just not what Mrs Brown's Boys is about. The scenes involving the blind ninjas are extremely clumsily directed and executed and O'Carroll's caricature of the leader of the ninjas is, to be quite honest, nothing short of crude and offensive. I hope they abandon any attempts to make further movies and try to resurrect the hilarious TV series in its true form before a live audience.

The Authorities try to shut down Mrs Brown's fruit and veg stall.

Was the movie the point in time where the series started to dip, prior to this the show seemed to be at its peak, I think fans like myself wanted to love this movie, but sadly it just wasn't very good.

Why is it that so many films fail to translate well from the comedy TV series, it reminds me of the awful Nan movie, some genuinely funny moments in the TV series, here though, it just wasn't funny.

The jokes fell flat, it was quite a painful watch, they get away with the jokes over half an hour, but ninety minutes, it was just too much. One or two of the moments where the cast laughed at the mistakes were funny, sadly the actual planned gags were excruciating.

I'd class myself as a real fan of the show, and I will be one of those that watch it regardless, but this movie truly was a clunker.

Had this worked, more movies would surely have followed, sadly this just wasn't any good.

Sadly it was awful.

3/10.