The Festival

Year:  2018
Director:  Iain Morris
Screenplay:  Keith Akushie and Joe Parnham
Starring:  Joe Thomas, Hammed Animashaun, Claudia O'Doherty, Emma Rigby, Jemaine Clement, Hannah Tointon
Running Time:  98 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nick (Thomas) is dumped by his girlfriend, Claudia (Tointon) on the day of their graduation.  To make matters worse, he makes a fool of himself by begging her to take him back on stage during the ceremony.  Claudia refuses and Nick falls into despair for days.  To cheer him up, his best friend Shaun (Animashaun) suggests they go to a huge open-air music festival, where Shaun, an aspiring DJ, hopes to give a sample of his music to his idol DJ Hammerhead (Noel Fielding), who performs wearing a hammerhead shark mask.  On the train Shaun befriends chatty Australian Amy (O'Doherty).  However, when Nick discovers that Claudia and her friends are also at the festival, the stage is set for a succession of humiliating disasters.

This marks the solo directorial debut by Iain Morris, who is best known for co-creating the British TV comedy series The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) which also starred Joe Thomas, and featured Hannah Tointon as his girlfriend (incidentally, Thomas and Tointon are together in real life too).  In fact there are so many parallels with The Inbetweeners that this film at times feels like some weird spin-off, Joe Thomas plays basically the same character in both, and the film opens with almost a reprise of a gag from an episode of The Inbetweeners.  The film is packed full of crude, gross-out gags, and there is one sequence involving a nipple ring and a fence that I found genuinely hard to watch.  It is a funny film though.  If you like crude humour then there is plenty to laugh at here, and it goes form one set-piece to another, so it doesn't really drag.  The main problem the film has is that Nick is such a deeply unlikeable character: selfish, whiny, boorish and rude, so it's really hard to care about what happens to him.  In contrast Hammed Animashaun and Claudia O'Doherty provide the heart of the film, funny and genuinely likeable, I wanted to see more of them than Nick's self-involved moaning.  It's the kind of film that is fine for some late-night post-pub viewing, and it is an enjoyable romp, although not as good as The Inbetweeners.  I have never been to a music festival, so if you are a fan of camping out in a muddy field with a few thousand other people you may see it in a very different light.  It has a few fun cameos from comedians including Noel Fielding, Jemaine Clement and Nick Frost and rapper Big Narstie. 

             
Joe Thomas, Claudia O'Doherty and Hammed Animashaun are at The Festival

The Inbetweeners 2

Year:  2014
Directors:  Damon Beesley and Iain Morris
Screenplay:  Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, based on the TV series The Inbetweeners created by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris
Starring:  Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison, Joe Thomas, Elizabeth Berrington, Tamla Kari
Running Time:  96 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nerdy university student Will (Bird), unhappily partnered university student Simon (Thomas) and dim-witted bank employee Neil (Harrison) decide to take a holiday to Australia to meet their friend Jay (Buckley), who boasts that he is a millionaire superstar DJ in Sidney.  When they get there though, they quickly realise that Jay has vastly overstated the reality:  He is a toilet attendant in a Sidney nightclub and lives in a tent in his uncle's backyard.  However, when Will chances upon Katie (Berrington), who he knows from his private school days, the lads join her and her backpacking friends.  Of course, everything soon ends in a series humiliating disasters.

This second big-screen outing from the successful British TV sitcom, The Inbetweeners (2008 - 2010), takes the basic structure of the successful first film, and expands it.  The Inbetweeners Movie (2011) took the main characters from suburban England to Malia, and subjected them to the usual gross-out hilarity.  In this film, written and directed by series creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, making their directorial debuts, the locations are more far-flung and exotic, and the gross-out gags are grosser than ever.  It is very, very funny in places, though it is not as successful as the first film or the television series, which at it's best was a masterclass in cringe comedy, partly because this film feels almost cartoonish compared to the TV series, which, while obviously exaggerated, always felt like it had a sense of reality.  This is very much a male oriented film.  The main female characters seem to be there to either be lusted after by the guys, or to be venomous harridans.  It is also unlikely to do much for Anglo-Australian relations.  It does have some heart to it, although it seems to lack the genuine sympathy for the characters that the TV series has at it's best.  It's unlikely to win many new fans, but for those already fond of the antics of Jay, Will, Neil and Simon, there is plenty to enjoy, because it really is very funny, and there is a real chemistry between the four leads. 

Simon (Joe Thomas), Will (Simon Bird), Jay (James Buckley) and Neil (Blake Harrison) go walkabout in The Inbetweeners 2   

The Inbetweeners Movie

Year of Release:  2011
Director:  Ben Palmer
Screenplay:  Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, based on the television series The Inbetweeners created by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris
Starring:  Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley, Blake Harrison
Running Time:  97 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nerdy Will McKenzie (Bird), lovelorn Simon Cooper (Thomas), mouthy Jay Cartwright (Buckley) and dopey Neil Sutherland (Harrison) have finally finished their A-levels and are about to leave high school for an unsuspecting world.  To celebrate finishing school, and also to cheer up a recently dumped Simon, the boys decide to go on a "lad's holiday" to the Greek island of Malia to indulge in sun, sex and booze, not necessarily in that order.  However the holiday soon turns into a catalogue of humiliating disasters.

The Inbetweeners was a British television comedy show about four teenage boys growing up in suburbia, which ran for eighteen episodes between 2008 and 2010, and quickly went from a small cult series to a hit mainstream success, even now, ten years after it ended, there is rarely a week goes by without at least one episode being shown somewhere on British TV.  The film takes the tried and tested route of umpteen big screen adaptations of British TV comedies, by whisking the familiar characters away to a new location.  There is really nothing here that you wont have seen many times before, but it's an enjoyable and very funny film.  As with the series, the film concentrates on cringe humour and toilet humour, although all the gross-out elements have been dialed up for the film.  However, again as with the series, what makes the film work is that there is a heart beating under all the bodily fluids and knob gags.  As badly as the boys behave, they never entirely lose sympathy.  Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison are good as ever in their familiar roles.  The film also features Laura Haddock, Tamla Kari, Jessica Knappett and Lydia Rose Bewley as the group of girls who befriend the boys, and Emily Head as Simon's ex Carli (incidentally Emily Head's father, Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Anthony Stewart Head, has a cameo as Will's father).  The female characters are sidelined, in favour of the boys antics.  Although Laura Haddock is very good as Alison  and her romance with Will is quite touching.  Familiar faces from the TV series make brief appearances,  with Greg Davies as the sardonic teacher Mr. Gilbert giving a memorable speech to the school leavers ("Try not to kill anyone.  It reflects very badly on all of us here.")
This will definitely please fans of the TV series, and if you haven't seen it, then the film is still perfectly accessible.
It's perfect funny, late night, post-pub entertainment.

         From left to right: Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison in The Inbetweeners Movie