Full of inventive swearing and performances that define coarseness, this satire kicks the hell out of our political so-called masters. Tom Hollander is very good as an Everyman or Candide figure, an innocent abroad (literally), a well-meaning MP, Simon Foster, whose off-the-cuff comment that war is ‘unforeseeable’ leads all too foreseeably to his demise in the murky macho world of politics as controlled by masters of media spin such as Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). No form of rhetorical offence is left unused by this vicious control freak as he seeks to ‘sex up’ the dossier that will provide the ammunition for an invasion in the Middle East. The camera work is great – constantly panning, focusing, shifting, jumping closer, catching reaction shots on the hoof, and framing the players within its sights as they connive and scheme.
Watch out for James Gandolfini as a liberal but forceful US General, at one point doing his maths on a child’s pink plastic calculator – he needs to prove how many men the US military is lacking to win a war, point being, you can only claim you’ve won if you have some men left alive at the end. Or Chris Addison as Hollander’s aide, Toby, who callowly claims he cheated on his girlfriend and had sex with an opposite number on the US team in the hope it would stop the war. Or Zach Woods with his croaking choked voice as the Machiavellian US junior staffer, Chad, playing the best move for his opponent at chess only to tell her she’s moved in to check. Or Paul Higgins as Jamie, a crazed underling of Tucker’s who stamps a fax machine to bits because it is in the room and because he can. Or Steve Coogan as Paul, a man worried about a wall in a complete digression from the main plot. Or Mimi Kennedy as the US Assistant Secretary of Diplomacy, bleeding from the gums, her mouth clogged with tissues, asking bewilderedly, ‘Am I a monster?’ There are so many great gags that the film earns its right to be as acid-tongued and potty-mouthed as it is.
The ending of the script and the narrative is a bit of a fudge but somehow moving in its messiness. Hollander is threatened with being ‘hounded to an assisted suicide’ which doesn’t quite make sense, but with Tucker anything, no matter how awful, is possible. This, after all, is a man who compounds his sarcastic delivery of a censored iteration of the ‘f’ word by splicing it with an uncensored delivery of the ‘c’ word. Monstrous.
Watch out for James Gandolfini as a liberal but forceful US General, at one point doing his maths on a child’s pink plastic calculator – he needs to prove how many men the US military is lacking to win a war, point being, you can only claim you’ve won if you have some men left alive at the end. Or Chris Addison as Hollander’s aide, Toby, who callowly claims he cheated on his girlfriend and had sex with an opposite number on the US team in the hope it would stop the war. Or Zach Woods with his croaking choked voice as the Machiavellian US junior staffer, Chad, playing the best move for his opponent at chess only to tell her she’s moved in to check. Or Paul Higgins as Jamie, a crazed underling of Tucker’s who stamps a fax machine to bits because it is in the room and because he can. Or Steve Coogan as Paul, a man worried about a wall in a complete digression from the main plot. Or Mimi Kennedy as the US Assistant Secretary of Diplomacy, bleeding from the gums, her mouth clogged with tissues, asking bewilderedly, ‘Am I a monster?’ There are so many great gags that the film earns its right to be as acid-tongued and potty-mouthed as it is.
The ending of the script and the narrative is a bit of a fudge but somehow moving in its messiness. Hollander is threatened with being ‘hounded to an assisted suicide’ which doesn’t quite make sense, but with Tucker anything, no matter how awful, is possible. This, after all, is a man who compounds his sarcastic delivery of a censored iteration of the ‘f’ word by splicing it with an uncensored delivery of the ‘c’ word. Monstrous.