Film Reviews: The Bad Education Movie, Vacation, Gemma Bovery, The Wolfpack

Hapless teacher Alfie Wickers (Jack Whitehall) takes his class away to celebrate the end of exams

A LESSON in big screen TV comedy…

 

The Bad Education Movie (15, 90mins)
VERDICT: 3/5
Director: Elliot Hegarty
Stars: Jack Whitehall, Jeremy Irvine, Talulah, Riley, Iain Glen

Vacation (15, 99mins)
VERDICT: 2/5
Directors: Jonathan Goldstein and John, Francis Daley
Stars: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Chris, Hemsworth, Chevy Chase

Gemma Bovery (15, 99mins)
VERDICT: 2/5
Director: Anne Fontaine
Stars: Gemma Arterton, Jason Flemyng, Fabrice Luchini

The Wolfpack (15, 90mins, documentary)
VERDICT: 4/5

No prizes for guessing the inspiration behind The Bad Education Movie, a spin-off of the popular BBC Three TV show with a cast of hapless, misbehaving children, and “teacher” Jack Whitehall.

The Bad Education Movie will not repeat the huge success of The Inbetweeners Movie, as it is not as funny and does not have the same following, but fans will enjoy seeing class clown Alfie Wickers (Whitehall) make an epic fool of himself during a disastrous school trip to Cornwall.

To celebrate the end of GCSEs Wickers takes his class to Cornwall (second choice to the prohibitively pricey Las Vegas) where they get mixed up with the Cornish Liberation Army after an encounter in the pub with an old smuggler, Pasco (Iain Glen).

Wickers becomes the rebels’ unwitting messiah, Life Of Brian-style.

Whitehall is endearingly stupid and Joanna Scanlan is a hoot as a killjoy mother out to destroy him.

The script is patchy and the story too silly for its own good but there are enough laughs to make this a hit with the target audience.

After watching Vacation, a reboot of 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, I am tempted to say “Come back Chevy Chase, all is forgiven”.

Except that would be a lie. I have never found Chevy Chase funny.

The 1980s comedy star’s movies rarely progressed beyond passable; Caddyshack was OK but does anyone watch it now?

Instead, he gave us the heroically average Spies Like Us, Three Amigos! and the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise.

If you have any residual affection towards the Vacations, and I admit to quite enjoying National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation from 1989, it will be snuffed out by this continuation of the series.

Ed Helms is gormless Rusty Griswold, the now grown-up son of Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold and equally annoying.

Determined to give his family a good time he scraps the annual log cabin vacation for a road trip to amusement park Walley World, excitedly breaking the news to wife Debbie (Christina Applegate), drippy teenage son James (Skyler Gisondo) and obnoxious younger son Kevin (Steele Stebbins)as if they were off to Egypt to see the Pyramids.

The strange and annoying thing about Rusty is what a dinosaur dad he is, laying down the law to his homemaker wife as if it was the 1950s.

He is the earner, a pilot for a regional airline, and makes all the decisions. This character trait is not developed and feels like a hangover from the dated original.

It would have been better to make Rusty a stay-at-home dad with a career wife, who is desperate to reassert his manhood by organising an adventurous vacation.

Instead, Mum is characterised as a bit of a tart, and her family learns she was known as “Debbie Do Anything” and notched up 30 lovers in college.

This prompts a crisis of confidence in Rusty who only had three.

The writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley claim to have updated the story but little feels fresh or contemporary beyond some de rigeur crudeness.

Not that this would matter if it was funny, but there are almost zero laughs.

Only one sequence stands out courtesy of Chris Hemsworth (Thor) playing an amusingly buff and pleased with himself local weatherman with a monster-sized appendage.

Unsurprisingly, not even a late appearance from Chevy Chase (looking alarmingly bloated) and Beverly D’Angelo as his wife can make this a Vacation worth taking.

It’s another Chevy Chase clunker.

Much as I love Gemma Arterton and enjoy seeing men compete for her attentions, not even her charms can generate much sense of purpose in Gemma Bovery, a rather pointless updating of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

It is based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds who wrote Tamara Drewe, which was also adapted into a film starring Gemma Arterton, with which this film shares many similarities and failings.

As in Tamara Drewe, Arterton plays a frisky honeypot whose arrival in a small rural community sends the local chaps into a tizz.

In this case, as opposed to the West Country, we are in Normandy where Gemma arrives with hubby Charlie (Jason Flemyng) to live the dream of sensual French living.

Alas, Gemma’s appetites are aroused not by her hubby but a young toff, blond-mopped law student Hervé (Niels Schneider), while older married baker Martin (Fabrice Luchini) follows her every move.

After a promising and lighthearted start the picture becomes meandering and dreary, with little reason for us to be interested in or care about these characters despite the many lingering close-ups of Arterton.

A story that should be creepy and dispiriting becomes a powerfully life-affirming tale in The Wolfpack, a fascinating documentary about seven siblings raised in almost total isolation in a run-down New York apartment.

The offspring of a Peruvian immigrant father and his American wife Susanne, the six boys and a girl (each one named after a Hindu deity) were homeschooled and rarely allowed out; one year they did not leave the apartment at all.

Movies were their window on the world and they would re-enact favourite scenes in home-made costumes.

They also gave the children the gumption to break free.

Filmmaker Crystal Moselle, who stumbled across the family, has crafted an unusual and thought-provoking film with unexpected charm.