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Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)

Director: Edward McHenry, Rory McHenry

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2 reviews

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

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User reviews of this film

FishyBites_12 said...

Posted on Oct 11 2010 10:23 This movie was the dogs bollocks! Recommended for anyone with a sense of humour and a licking for crazy! haha where did you get this reviewer TimeOut? I thought you were smarter than that. Jackboots Tally Hooooooooo!!!!!!!! Best film of the year!!!!

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Dodo said...

Posted on Oct 11 2010 10:21 This is not stop motion animation Dave Calhooooon you you loon! Who let you review films. I don't trust Timeout anymore...get a clue dude.

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