It’s become something of a common trait in comedy cinema – especially the bad stuff – to tack a blooper reel over the closing credits. There is no blooper reel at the end ‘Freebird’, perhaps because it’s difficult to detect whether any unusable footage wasn’t eventually jimmied into the final cut. It certainly feels that way.
This British indie biker movie-cum-jumped-up jolly boy’s tour sees three middle-aged roustabouts (Gary Stretch, Geoff Bell and Phil Daniels) head off into the Welsh countryside to score some weed for their boss, Michael Bowles. But things take a turn for the affectedly wacky as they accidentally crash a hillside biker gang war (sic), and so we are treated to an interminable barrage of miscellaneous pratfalls, our only partition from which is a surreal, 20-minute mushroom bender sequence which succeeds in being one of the most juvenile, ill-advised and deathly dull scenes in recent memory.
Considering Daniels has spent the entire first half of the film spouting such obsolete drug lingo like ‘pass the bong, man’ and ‘roll me up a fat one’, we should really have seen it coming.