by Julian Wood
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Steve Coogan, Oliver Alvin-Wilson, Penny Ashmore, Richard Dempsey
Intro:
… a tribute band playing accurate covers but only serving to remind us of the gap between this and the original.
Why repaint the Mona Lisa? Should you do it just to show you can paint too? Okay, we are being provocative, but the decision by Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci to do a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s near-perfect 1964 anti-war film has this elephant-in-the-room question sitting squarely in the background. Not that there isn’t skill on display here. There is, and the production has gusto and a sense of love for the source material, which carries us along to an extent.
Filmed at London’s Noel Coward Theatre, just as with theatre-going everywhere, sometimes a play doesn’t come off. Quite possibly, the multi-talented Coogan will look back on this heroic failure as a bridge too far.
Director Sean Foley is inventive with the staging and there are recreations of locations like the famous War Room – complete with the ‘big board’ tracking the errant bomber that sets off the disaster in the original satire. Then there is action located in the bomber itself where, in the original, Slim Pickens nearly steals the film as the downhome pilot doggedly improvising on the insane order. It would be entering spoiler territory to say how this particular production deals with this crucial contrasting set-up, but it is a bold effort.
Iannucci and Coogan have worked together before on the sometimes-hilarious Alan Partridge. Iannucci has also lambasted power-mad protagonists in his own work such as The Death of Stalin, so he should have a feel for the material. He can even add a couple of updated Trump-era jokes of his own; a temptation that he fails to avoid. However, the cast here lacks the full-on memorable craziness of the original actors, especially noticeable in the casting of Giles Terera, who has the unenviable task of recreating the performance of George C Scott from the original.
Then of course there is Coogan himself, bravely standing in for Peter Sellers, as it were. In the original film, Sellers famously created several roles including the absurdly stiff upper lipped British officer, the bemused and always behind the action US president, and, most exquisite of all, the eponymous mad ex-NAZI bomb scientist. It is all here, the wheelchair, the lopsided head and accent, the involuntary gloved hand with a mind of its own. However, even for an actor/comedian of Coogan’s abilities, it is simply impossible to escape the accusation of parody. You can imagine him delighting his friends with this turn at a dinner party. It is different to build a whole play around it for a paying audience. In the end, the play becomes a tribute band playing accurate covers but only serving to remind us of the gap between this and the original.
