#57 ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING

#57 ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING

Starring Simon Peg, Kate Beckinsale, the surviving members of Monty Python and the voice of Robin Williams. Plus a load of British comedy actors including Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal.

Written by Gavin Scott and Terry Jones. Directed by Terry Jones. 85 minutes long.

Pegg is a failed writer and teacher with a gambling problem who is picked at random by the intergalactic council of aliens (the Monty Python bunch) and given the power to do absolutely anything just by wishing for it and waving his hand. The reason, is to find out if Earth is worthy of membership to the council or just utter annihilation. Kate Beckindale is the love interest (who sleeps with him as a dare) and researcher on a TV show about books who lives below him and Robin Williams provides the voice of his dog, Dennis and if you listen really, really carefully you can actually hear him sob at the end of every line.

Nothing can quite prepare you for the awfulness of this cinematic abomination of ineptitude. Using London as its location but shooting it as if it were New York, Terry Jones directs with all the subtly of a note tied to a brick thrown thru a plate-glass window. Every actor hams it up for the camera, stopping just short of mugging and gurning, all except Simon Pegg who refuses any opportunity not to twist his face up or emote as if he's in a panto and he's acting to the back row. The only thing missing was him turning to the fourth wall and winking at the audience.

The jokes are as embarrassing as they are cringy, characters point and laugh like drains to help the audience known when there's a joke (for example at one point all British police uniforms are transformed into pink ones and all the man have giant ears and duck feet and a cult of obsessed religious nuts stand and point, laughing loudly to let us know it's funny, it's not). Earlier on, Pegg transforms his best friend into a duck and then a sausage to shut him up just so he can chase Beckinsale into a sandwich bar and get accused of stealing the sausage from a plate of sausages sat at the till, which are there for no other reason than to set up the joke of him having stolen the sausage in the first place. Pegg refuses to pay so the shop worker then smashes him over the head with a china plate of sausages and demands her 80p for the stolen sausage. Hilarious. Like wise are the insanely pedantic results of his wishes, at one point he's chasing Beckingsale (again) who escapes on a bus so he uses his amazing powers to be transported on the bus but he is literally transported onto the top of the bus - Geddit? Cos he said, 'on the bus'. Next he asks to be inside the bus, and wait for it, he ends up inside the engine. Geddit? Cos he asked to be 'in' the bus. Laugh? No, no I didn't. Finally he asks to be inside the passenger area of the bus. God, by this point the whole audience was utterly silence, seriously you could have heard a pin drop.

A comedy American villain (Rob Riggle) is thrown into the mix half way through the film to try and inject life into the proceedings but he proves even worse than everyone else. Sub plots are mixed up and then dropped. Every now and then we cut back to the council, all cgi and voiced by the Pythons who all have the names of women, like Sharon, because that's funny.

Seriously this is a very piss poor film, it has no redeemable qualities at all, nothing to save it and absolutely noting to recommend it at all. If you had a choice of seeing this or absolutely anything else, I'd say go and see Fantastic Four.

Anyone who recommends this to you as a funny night out needs to be expunged from your life. And if you have any fondness for Williams, Pegg, Eddie Izzard, Joanna Lumley or the Pythons then avoid this like the plague it'll only make you hate them all with a venom and loathing you wouldn't have thought possible.

I never thought I'd see a film this year as awful as Fantastic Four or Pixels and I haven't I've seen something worse, much, much worse.
 
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