Tag: The Naked Gun

Fackham Hall (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Downtown Abbey meets Airplane, but not in a plane crash way.

We’re beginning to reach the end of 2025, which means it’s soon time for me to write the annual awards. So I’m starting to think of the best movies of the year. Among the obvious candidates are a film about the power of music mixed in with a gothic tale of racism and American history, a personal drama about trauma and family via a visit to a concentration camp, and a tale about the existence of the afterlife and all the implications of eternity. All very serious topics, all very “big”. Despite how that might make me look; I adore silliness. I like silly, fun little films, of which Fackham Hall is one of the best of the year. Really, the only comparison lately is The Naked Gun, which had the advantage of having an established style.

So, how does this compare? It’s not quite as joke heavy as TNG, with a distinct lack of sign-based jokes which aren’t signposted. There are also fewer background jokes. Basically, I don’t think there are any jokes that I missed that I’ll catch on a second viewing. So I didn’t laugh as often as I did during TNG, but I did laugh louder. I can remember more jokes from this than I can TNG, although that might be down to me having seen it more recently.

But does it stand out on its own? I’d say it does. There was a surprisingly full screening when I went, and everybody seemed entertained. Nobody walked out, which for a film barely advertised and which from the poster you could mistake for a period drama, was a pleasant surprise.

The performances are exactly what’s needed. I’m not familiar with Ben Radcliffe, but he does seem like he’d be perfect in an actual period drama. Thomasin McKenzie is building a weird filmography, which makes it hard to pin down her niche: JoJo Rabbit, Last Night In Soho, The Justice Of Bunny King, and now this. All of those are completely different films, and her roles are very different, yet they’re all somehow still “her”; she’s one of the most chameleonic (is that a word? Is now) performers around. Katherine Waterston is quickly becoming one of my favourite performers, which is odd as I’ve never intentionally seen a film because she’s in it; she just happens to be in films I watch, and happens to always be REALLY good. She has a face that feels like its come straight out of the 1940’s, so she’s perfect for films like this. She also has surprisingly perfect comic timing.

On the downside, the plot is muddled. The murder of the lord feels weird in terms of pacing. The arrival of the detective investigating it turns it more into a Hercule Poirot pastiche than a period parody. That feels like a genre rife for parody, but we’re not given enough time to fully explore that. I would be fully up for a sequel with that concept, by the way. If the murder was cut out, then it would leave a hole that needs fixing (and you’d lose one of the funniest sequences), but I’m sure it could be replaced with something more suitable. It feels like Jimmy Carr wanted to put those jokes in, not realising it might have been smarter to save them for a different film; now he can’t use those jokes and scenes in a more suitable film.

The reveal at the end is a bit too obvious, but not obvious enough that it seems deliberate and is, as such, a joke. Similar to the reveal of the murderer. But I think that if you go into a film like this expecting to be wowed by the plot, you’re in the wrong movie.

Really, the biggest negative of watching this is how it affected my viewing experience of another film. You know how, when you play Tetris or Guitar Hero, it changes the way you see things briefly? All you can see is falling circles and bricks for a while? I went through a comedic version of that. My brain watched the next fil,m and it took about 20 minutes for it to adjust and try not to see a joke in every single action or moment. That’s the biggest compliment I can give this film; It broke my brain with comedy.

The Naked Gun (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Frank Drebin Jr. attempts to stop a fiendish billionaire (is there any other kind?) from activating their P.L.O.T device.

This is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen (editor’s note: this review was written before I watched the 2025 Ice Cube-led War Of The Worlds), it’s ridiculous, it’s cliche, and it’s over the top. It’s also f*cking brilliant. I’m a huge fan of the original trilogy (and the TV show, which is sorely underrated), so I went into this with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Excited because I love movies like this – dumb, funny, and weird oddness. Studios and general audiences don’t feel the same way, so they’re not made as much as they should. The last film I can remember which even came close to that chaotic energy was probably Bottoms. But nervous because I was concerned it would be less like the original movies, and more like the execrable “[WORD] Movie” parodies that plagued the 2000s. Movies which forgot to have jokes, and instead had references, or if they did have jokes, they were jokes that they didn’t realise were in the thing they were mocking.

Also, there was a chance I could love this movie and still have it be a bad cinema experience. What if I were in a busy screening and it’s met with silence? Something like that is made much better by being in a room with others who are laughing. If I were the only one who enjoyed it, it would definitely sour me somewhat.

Not to worry, the audience I was with found it hilarious, as has everybody else I know who has seen it. It seems to be liked by both audiences and critics, which is always a good sign. It helps that everybody involved clearly loves the project. The core cast is almost perfect; Liam Neeson is much better at comedy than many people assume he is. He’s not a “My dogs got no nose, how does he smell? Terrible” type comedic actor; he’s a “I am serious in the face of the ridiculous” comedy actor, much like Leslie Nielsen was back in the day. Pamela Anderson is great as the sex symbol female lead made famous by Priscilla Presley (who makes a cameo). Paul Walter Hauser feels somewhat underused, and I was disappointed that the O.J. Simpson reference in the trailer was the only appearance of that character (named Not Nordberg Jr.).

Now, is it as funny as the originals? Kind of. When it’s funny, it does match the original. But it’s not as funny as often. That’s not me saying it’s not packed with jokes, it is. But the original was like being shot with a machine gun of jokes of various types, where it felt like every sign or prop was a joke. There are multiple moments where it feels like there’s a comedic gap, normal dialogue or backgrounds in which the writers could have squeezed more jokes in. Compared to most movies? It’s full. But compared to Naked Gun? You can definitely see opportunities, especially with some jokes that don’t have payoffs. There’s a prison break scene (which was in the trailer) that’s never followed up on. There’s a violent fight at the end, which would have been perfect for some of the escaped convicts to make a re-appearance. They could have squeezed in some cameos to make sure you remember those who broke out. That’s not a major criticism, but it definitely feels like a wasted opportunity.

The major loss between this and the original is the credits. The opening credits of the original are iconic, to the point where they’re used in the ending credits here. There’s no attempt to do a version here. If they did, yes, it would have come off as pandering. But it’s not replaced by anything either. There’s a very quick “title won’t fit on screen” gag, but no attempt to make the opening credits set the tone. Even the first two Deadpool movies had more suitable opening credits.

Like I said, those are all very minor issues, though. This film is great and I already miss it.

Why We Love….In The Loop

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It’s election season! Which, just like the football season, is something where the losing team get to claim it’s a close result if they lost by 40 points, and the winners get to claim “nobody can question us” when they win by 4. They both run far too long, consist of people straddling the poverty line claiming “they’re just like us” about millionaires who wouldn’t spit on them if they were on fire, and are likely to dominate the news for months on end. Unless you’re The Sun of course, who decided, in the middle of election season, that THIS was the most important bit of news in the world:

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Hold the front page: women have bums!

Due to the standard of political reporting by newspapers these days (which basically consists of “insult the party that our owner doesn’t support) is it any surprise that people are disengaged with politics? Almost every election now, no matter who wins the results are the same; the largest section of the results belong to non-voters. This is particularly weird when you look at some of the most dominant TV shows of this millennium; The Thick Of It, Veep, The Daily Show are some of the most well-regarded comedies ever made. It’s the same with drama too, particularly in America where The West Wing and House Of Cards are so well liked that if you say you don’t like them you’re likely to get thrown out of whatever room/building/spaceship you’re in. This shows that it’s not politics that people don’t like, it’s the state of politics. It’s like how if you refuse to eat rancid food, it’s not because you don’t like food, you just hate the option offered.

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So, this film in particular. A spin-off from the aforementioned The Thick Of It, featuring just four of the same characters, yet most of the same cast. This film gives a wonderful yet bleak view of what it actually means to be a modern politician; often thrown out of your depth, being put into no-win situations by other people, going from debating going to war whilst in Washington one week, to discussing someone’s garden wall falling down the next. This isn’t glamorous, it’s not sexy, it’s certainly not aspirational.

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Adapting a TV series to a feature length film is never easy, the path to successes like The Naked Gun and 21 Jump Street is littered with the corpses of Guest House Paradiso, Magic Roundabout, and countless Saturday Night Live films. This film works though, and I think part of that is because it uses different characters but the same actors. So you have actors who know the best way to play their roles, but new viewers don’t have episodes worth of character development and history that they need to know to enjoy the film, everyone starts on equal footing. The returning cast are in an odd position, people like Chris Addison now have to act alongside established acting behemoths like James Gandolfini, and the British cast more than hold their own. It also helps that it’s REALLY well done, the plot of this is extremely intricate and well developed. I spoke a short while ago about how you can have Friends on in the background and still get the gist of what’s going on, you definitely cannot do that with this. In fact, to be honest I’d recommend not even sneezing lest you risk missing someone’s facial reaction which then sets up the next plot development. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will be confused, actually even if you are paying attention it could still confuse you, but in a good way. Not in a “the screenwriters have no idea what they’re doing” way, in a “there is so much subtext in every line that I think I misread someone’s intentions”. It’s also REALLY funny, endlessly quotable, not just the political lines, there’s one line in particular I’ve always loved and will probably adapt to a facebook status at one point:

“Have you ever seen a film where the hero is a builder? No, because they never fucking turn up in the nick of time.”

The political stuff also works really well; where you have American and British politicians deciding whether to go to war based on dubious intelligence (good thing THAT’s not still an issue right? Right?). This film is actually quite rare in that it doesn’t present politicians either as evil, or as crusaders against evil. They’re just people who are put into situations they don’t understand by their bosses, which is something everyone can sympathise with. This somehow does the impossible, it makes politicians human. For that alone it deserves accolades, and for everything else, it deserves adoration.

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Oh yeah, it’s also kind of sweary, but never in a way that comes off as crass and infantile, which is a really fucking hard thing to pull off.