Dad’s Army has been too many years in the making. If only it took even longer then I would have spent my time more wisely and productively. I could have re-arranged my underpants under the Library of Congress system, or taken up seppuku as a hobby. Either pursuit would have been more productive than casting my eyes on the film equivalent of Martin O’Malley’s presidential bid. It just keeps going on and on, and you want to put it out of its misery. You look through your hands in horror, only to find your fingers have become the bars of the prison that is the auditorium. It is less entertainment than a prison sentence.
If, of course, your prison is also a residential nursing home. It’s as if the entire film has been cynically targeted at the elderly. 10 minutes in, Godfrey pisses on Jones in a ‘subtle’ attempt at humour. As if the geriatric golden shower wasn’t enough, we see Michael Gambon wearing a Hawaiian skirt. What larks! The only conclusion I can come to is that the writer hoped that anyone who remembers the brilliance, the love and the warmth of the original series has gone senile. Judging by the audience in the cinema with me, that might’ve been a canny move. But, amongst the sea of John McDonnell-lookalikes was a lone lady who laughed all the way through. I can only assume she was high from a warfarin overdose.
It does have a great ensemble. Bill Nighy. Catherine Zeta-Jones. Tom Courtenay. Legends of British cinema. But, it amazed me how they managed to assemble such a good cast and use them so poorly. There is only one single logical explanation I can find for the woeful caricatures of the original actors. They’re actually life-size cardboard cutouts. The sort you get peering out of student rooms. The producers have gone on Amazon and looked for cutouts of people who look vaguely like the original cast. If you’ve suffered a botched cataract operation in the last 15 years.
Bill Nighy isn’t playing Sergeant Wilson. He’s playing Bill Nighy. Lynn from Alan Partridge is playing Mrs Mainwaring. And though she’s one of the better characters in the film, she was never seen in the original. Blake Harrison is playing some weird sex-obsessed version of Pike. But of course, this film is seemingly intended to be viewed solely by old ladies who gave birth through asexual reproduction. Hence any innuendo is immediately followed up with a completely unsubtle explanation of why it is not innuendo at all. “I’m on top tonight,” says Mrs Mainwaring, only to then spell out that she’s on top bunk directly afterwards. It’s like William Gladstone has risen from the dead and censored the script with a blue pencil before giving it to Saga NoreÌn for a rewrite.
The sheer frustration I felt watching it. How the hell could they screw it up so badly? They barely played up the nostalgia factor, perhaps the biggest draw for the film, while the comic delivery seemed to have been inspired by Microsoft Sam. I didn’t even attempt to laugh: the amount of energy needed would surely have turned me into dust like the Nazi at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. If there was a straight choice between watching the film again and decomposition, I’d chose the latter. Now that would be choosing wisely.
You know, I’d have given Dad’s Army one star, but that would be unfair on the preceding advert for Butcher’s dog food. Even the ad by the South African tourist board was a better example of cinematography. The special effects team managed to make a pigeon look unrealistic. If British cinema can’t make a good computer generated pigeon when there are literally millions outside a bloody window, then what hope is there for us as a nation?
