The Nan Movie
WARNER BROSIn his track Bird on the Wire, the late Leonard Cohen wrote: “I have tried in my way to be free.” A beautiful idea. To be free. To live individually and try in some way to be free of what is expected and of what is needed. To live freely is to avoid The Nan Movie. Although it is impossible to know whether Cohen enjoyed the relative success of BBC’s The Catherine Tate Show, likely, he would not have found it a way to be free. Being shoehorned into a hot and airless screening room to wolf down The Nan Movie, a feature that failed to make a mark at the box office because of the war in Ukraine, Matthew Horne claims, is not a way to be free.
But what fun audiences can have on the road. They can hope their engine breaks on the way to see The Nan Movie, or they can pray for the ignition to be faulty. Anything that prevents them from getting from A to B and into the damp, depressing seats that housed audiences watching a film where a sketch-show character is inflated to feature-length proportions. It has happened before and it will happen again, much to the shame of audiences who never learn and probably don’t listen anyway. The Nan Movie hopes to capture the one-note joke of Catherine Tate’s most-infamous character, and doing that, apparently, means a scattershot collection of hopeless pratfalls and a backstory to a character best remembered for having an awful East London accent.
Still, that is enough for comedy audiences, the same ones that had to endure Mrs. Browns Boys D’Movie and Keith Lemon: The Movie. Comedians believing they can make the big leap to the bigger screen are ten a penny, and a short handful of them have barely managed it. In the Loop, this is not. The Nan Movie, for all its awful gags and non-existent pacing, is a drop-off in quality for everyone involved. Remarkably chilling considering the quality bar was so low to begin with. Josie Rourke may have removed her name from the director's slot on The Nan Movie, but those that need to know will never forget. How Brett Goldstein of Ted Lasso fame feels about the writing credit here is, well, it’s best not to think about how many big names are sullied by The Nan Movie.
Another comedy “legend” takes to the big screen for a hopefully one-off moment in the spotlight. The bulb is blinking and sending spritzes of electrical bubbles into the crowd below. If it didn’t kill off the career of Harry Hill with The Harry Hill Movie then it is safe to say that The Nan Movie, which relies on old caricatures that weren’t particularly resourceful or funny in the early 2000s. A road trip movie that relies just as much on hoping Nan falls onto the road and under a car as it does on the trip through familiar faces of British comedy. “Oh, I know them from better project, how did they end up in this?” will be the cries heard around living rooms brave enough to endure this tactically inept feature, with an audience that gets smaller and smaller for this dimmer and dimmer branch of empty comedy.