Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)
Director: Edward McHenry, Rory McHenry
Movie review
From Time Out London
If you were a filmmaker and wanted to recapture the spirit of ‘Team America’ – a hot-button satire, dressed in puerile clothes, full of smart film nods – in a British context, what story would you choose? Young brothers Edward and Rory McHenry, working with their father, production designer David McHenry, apply a similar extravaganza of bad taste, rendered with crude stop-motion animation and puppetry, to a counter-factual version of the Battle of Britain – one which adopts a tone a thousand times less solemn than Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Rollo’s ‘It Happened Here’. This time, the Nazis invade by digging a tunnel all the way to the West End, so foiling a lazy Churchill’s retirement plans, and march all the way to Hadrian’s Wall, where they have a final showdown with William Wallace – aka Mel Gibson – and his wild Scottish men.Surely good satire needs to show courage and relevance? It’s hardly bold when your characterisations are familiar from ‘’Allo ’Allo!’ and your subject is 70 years old and done to death. Visually, the film can be fun: the characters, from Goebbels’s anaemic runt to a British spiv in a Kentish village are rendered as grotesque caricatures and the filmmakers lay on thick the tongue-in-cheek pyrotechnics and blood-letting. But the script feels like the product of a feeble, end-of-term university revue circa 1949. There’s even a running joke about ‘fannies’. A notable voice cast, including Ewan McGregor and Timothy Spall, makes very little mark at all. Profoundly silly, it should be. Pointless, it shouldn’t.
Author: Dave Calhoun
Time Out London Issue 2094: 7 - 13 October, 2010
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now