tigerboy-4

First of all I am biased as the autobiographical novel on which this film is based is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of Milligan's career and the funniest thing I have ever read.

The film has a strong cast (but see below), but the script and direction are weak. It's as though they had no idea how to approach the material. Most of the time it's played as a "Carry On" style farce: then we get crude and jarring interludes of fashionable anti-war propaganda. The two styles just do not mesh or integrate.

As for the actors, they do their best, but the "recruits" are all too obviously in their mid-to-late-thirties, rather than the 18-22 year olds they are supposed to be. This problem makes their attempts at silliness and slapstick rather embarrassing, and the coming-of-age theme seems misplaced and irrelevant. Arthur Lowe is excellent as always, but could have been given much more to do. Jim Dale is just too cuddly to capture the central character, and has to resort to pulling faces and speaking in silly voices to compensate.

The one highlight comes very early, with Spike playing his own father- it's downhill from there.

I rented the DVD. It may be that everything that happened after the first hour or so was cinematic gold; maybe the characters suddenly burst into life; maybe someone said something that was devastatingly funny; maybe a series of brilliantly executed plot twists would have left me gasping in astonishment. I'll never know. After an hour of flat, insipid, self-indulgent crap I put my eyes, ears and brain out of their collective misery and pressed STOP. My theory on the production of this film is as follows: that gifted auteur, Mr Anderson, secretly scanned my brain and detected all the things that I find funny, moving or intellectually stimulating- he then ensured that his film included none of these features. He then double-checked for all the things that I find boring, crass, pretentious and irritating and ensured that all of these features were emphatically stressed in his shooting script.

Picture the scene: there's a building the size of Cheshire where the costumes are designed; another building twice the size where they are working on the effects; there are a row of twenty luxury trailers for the all star cast and a suite of state-of-the-art studios working on the soundtrack. Sir Ian arrives on set and says "Sorry loves, I hate to be a bit of an old-fashioned bore, but isn't a film, or "movie" as I believe you call them over here, supposed to have a script?". Panic!. The word goes out; "Get the work-experience kid. Give him ten comic books (not necessarily in the right order)and tell him we need a full screenplay by lunch." OK it may not have happened exactly like that, but that's certainly how it came over to me.