STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Britain has just invented a space exploration buggy named 'Explorer' that rivals anything the world's two space super-powers, America and Russia, have created. Spruce conman Will Spencer (Martin Kemp) plots to steal it, along with his old friend Tom (Chris Barrie), his computer whizz son Travis (Stefan Booth) and Will's niece Fiona (Joanna Taylor.) But Will's old adversary and now man-servant, Det Jarvis (Dennis Waterman) is determined to use the scam to bring him down and get back in the police force...or will he end up wanting in on the scam himself?
The first I saw of this movie was a poster of it in a magazine that boasted it was 'one of the few films in recent years to achieve an 100% British grade' and that we should 'do our part to keep the British film industry thriving' and see it, even though I can't name a single cinema it was released in. In other words, the BFI is in such a bad state it's now trying to make us feel we have a duty to go out and see whatever rubbish it's responsible for! In these post Sex Lives of the Potato Men days though, I suppose that's something you could believe...
The film was entirely British made, then, and I guess it shows all the way. Indeed, the film does look very cheap and the low budget is clear for all to see. And then there's the cast. Martin Kemp with a Cambridge accent?!? I struggled to keep a straight face through-out. I don't know if that's how Chris Barrie talks in real life, but I found it very annoying anyway. Then there's some ex-Hollyoaks actor who looks like he's wondered right out of panto which only adds to the cheapness of it all and as for Joanna Taylor, one of the things I learned from the film Shoot 'Em Up is if an actress isn't giving a particularly great performance it always helps if she has a nice pair of breasts to stare at instead of her face and, well, that works here. And finally, Dennis Waterman ('I could be so good for...a disgruntled ex police-man!!!') Apparently he gets annoyed at them taking the p!ss out of his voice in Little Britain but it sounds very weird here, like he's put a funny twang on it that makes it sound rather peculiar and unsettling indeed.
A cheap and unfunny experience all round, then, that does no favours for the BFI and certainly none for us. *
