Recently I've watched both seasons of Whatever Happened to Likely Lads followed by this feature film. Although the antics of Bob and Terry did seem to start losing their edge after the first half of S2 (not unusual for long TV series), overall it was a very enjoyable and a refreshing experience. The movie, however, turned out to be a disappointment.
First, the scenario itself was quite weak - it lacked direction, there was no central storyline and as a result, the film didn't have a build-up and a climax - the two things that made the majority of TV episodes work so well.
Secondly the humour was by and large recycled - the jokes, innuendos and the typical Bob/Thelma tug o' war were all just the twitched versions of various TV scenes. And given the movie goes on for longer than a TV episode, watching the same thing over again, coupled with the absence of a coherent plot, made me feel bored halfway through.
Onto the characters. Brigit Forsyth's Thelma got a bigger part to play in the film than she would've had in a typical TV episode. But given that in the show the character was (deliberately) kept one-dimensional, being "your stereotypical suburban wife", the enhancement of her role in the movie just made the scenes more dull and cliched. James Bolam's character, on the other hand, for some reason seemed to have lost a lot of the natural wit and charm that in the past would stir up the setting and enthrall in the viewer. Here we see Terry being somewhat lost both in his love life, as well as in his housing estate.
The film also portrays a great deal of philosophical midlife-crisis-dialogues between the main characters, (reckoning in places where the pub banter would have normally been instead). As for me those scenes not only fail to blend in with the usual light-hearted manner of Bob and Terry's adventures, but also, they contributed little to the storyline, if not distracted from it. Perhaps it was just unexpected, (and hence, quite odd), to observe the "lads" from this angle, not least because the characters have never been developed in that direction in the first place.
Overall, the film felt like an enmeshment of several of the less successful TV episodes and didn't add anything new to the story and the relationship of Bob and Terry as we know it.
