The Trial of Tony Blair

This fantasy was utter garbage. I thought Michael Moore cornered the market on ridiculous anti-government movies, but this one was far worse than anything he ever did. No wonder critics of the British media complain it's driven by tabloid journalism. This movie is a left-wing loony's greatest fantasy come to life on the big screen. Anyone even slightly to the right of such rabid Bush-bashers should be appalled it ever got funding to be made. I'm sure it will do well in Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea, though. It's hard to believe that in these days of insane Muslims blowing up innocent commuters there is anyone in the U.K. who thinks Britain should surrender in the war on terrorism. I guess it's no longer the country I admired for standing alone against the Nazis nearly 70 years ago. All hail Neville Chamberlain and the pathetic policy of appeasement!

As if to prove that Michael Sheen doesn't have a monopoly over the role of Tony Blair, Robert Lindsay gives a magnificently comic performance in this very funny satire set three years in the future when Tony finally decides to stand down. Hilary Clinton is in the White House, George Bush is in rehab, ('he was found comatose on his ranch'. 'I'm surprised anyone noticed'), and the far from charismatic Gordon Brown scrapes through the General Election with a majority of two. It is then that Gordon bows to international pressure and allows Tony to be extradited to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes. Turning on the news immediately after watching this and hearing that one of the serving Prime Minister's closest advisors had been arrested in the 'cash for honours' inquiry only shows how prescient Simon Cellan-Jones' satire really is and how hard it may be to separate fact from fiction.

Alastair Beaton's script is a joy. It's clever, pertinent and side-splittingly funny but it is Lindsay's barn-storming, grand-standing performance as the deluded Blair that lifts this into a class of it's own. He is supported by a wonderfully straight-faced Phoebe Nicholls as Cherie, who chooses to distance herself from her liability of a husband and by Peter Mullan's blank and insipid Gordon Brown. Already a contender for best single programme of the year.

The premise of the programme was that after eventually standing down as Prime Minister Tony Blair is called to the Hague to face war crime charges. Ithought this, although slightly far fetched was a great piece of Drama and shows why More4 is one of the best channels to come out of the usual dross of digital channels. Robert Lindsays portrayal of Tony Blair was magnificent and rather than doing an impression of Blair instead gave a great performance. Peter Mullan as Gordon Brown was inspired and it was well into the show before I even realised that it was him playing the part, and although only seen briefly Alistair Armstrong as The image conscious David Cameron was brilliant. The soundtrack also was well devised from Johnny Cash to The Killers. But perhaps the most impressive part of the drama is not the funny elements or to see Blair get his just desserts, rather the idea that the War on Terror has had a deep emotional impact on Blair causing him to have hallucinations and nightmares. All in all a great programme.

Some people really, really dislike Tony Blair. And they're very angry with him, too. That's the overriding impression I get from this film.

At times it plays like it's been written and produced by achingly left-wing sixth formers, and if you, like them, see Blair as a one dimensional villain, then this is probably just the kind of revenge fantasy you'll relish. For anyone who sees both the man and the whole Iraq episode as a tad more complex, then it'll more than likely have you snorting with derision.

I deliberately reserve my criticism for the writer and producers because I actually think the actors are pretty good. Robert Lindsay picks up some of the verbal and physical mannerisms of Blair quite well and hints at more psychological depth than many caricatures allow. And I thought Phoebe Nicholls was excellent as Cherie, but mostly because she's a fine actress no matter what she's in. The problem is the material they're both stuck with, which is more often than not very one-note, cringingly one-sided and sometimes downright ridiculous.

Are we really to believe that everyone, and I do mean everyone, around Blair is constantly needling him about Iraq, making snide comments about his 'legacy', and mocking him openly to his face - yet somehow he either doesn't notice or just doesn't care? His assistants have apparently chosen to stay with him in his post-PM career, yet they behave as though they hold him in utter contempt all the time. Cherie seems at once to be loyal and caring, yet moments later she is distancing herself, even insisting that her name is Cherie Booth. Their relationship seemed completely wrong - again not through any fault of the actors, but rather because the script forces them into being mere mouthpieces for the writer's own heavily biased perspective. We're meant to believe that a protester would be allowed to camp outside Blair's private home and shout insults at him 24/7, even though Blair has left public office by this point and would be entitled to all the protections of any other citizen; that the US would throw Blair under a bus because it was politically expedient to do so; that the UK government would do something frankly risible at the UN in order to pave the way for a prosecution of Blair. All these details are technicalities, you might say, to create the conditions for the drama. But they mount up to such an extent that it screams desperation on the part of the writer, as he scrambles to rearrange the real world furniture in just the right order to bring about the denouement he wants. And much of it is also internally inconsistent. I simply didn't believe these characters were anything more than the writer's own voice shouting at the unfairness of the world.

The very worst moment comes when Blair is at a police station and encounters what has to be the most irksome, self-righteous, self-satisfied character ever to appear on screen. Seriously, this police man is a study in smug, insisting to Blair that his comments are not political but just him being a human being. This moment alone is so absurd in its easy moral reductionism and high self-regard that it poisons the whole piece, leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

There are some chilling, well-filmed moments of Blair having nightmarish delusions about Iraq, but mostly the filmmakers are more interested in seeing Blair suffer and be humiliated than they are in exploring any real psychological truth.

I genuinely didn't like this film. I thought it was nasty and a waste of some talented actors. Whatever your views on Iraq and Tony Blair's decisions, a fantasy polemic like this does no good at all. All it does is serve up a fictionalised version of a real human being to be hated, mocked and punished. Great drama should be about much more than that.

The year 2010 has come and long gone without these events transpiring, and setting it up as a future that never was ensured the movie would quickly render itself outdated, which is only one of many reasons that it was doomed to fail from the outset. The whole conceit of the movie is on that list, as it's utterly ridiculous that these events would occur in reality, and it is so hamfisted that it doesn't even work as satire. I'll confess I'm from the other side of the pond than most viewers and reviewers of the piece, but I appreciate a lot of British television series and movies, with this obviously not counted among them. Putting the special relationship on trial in an intelligent way that explored all of the complexities therein could have been compelling, but the makers of the movie settled for a simplistic version of Bush as the greatest of evil and anyone standing with him the same. It borders on apology for terrorists, as if it was unholy war started by the US that prompted terrorist attacks rather than the reverse, and it paints the problem as Blair being in thrall to Bush, never confronting Britain's past in the region, which preceded US involvement by centuries. It's more straw man argument than movie, and the missed opportunities for something more are reason enough to make this a must-miss piece of political theater and propaganda.