Legendary family holiday fun
There’s roughly one week left of the school summer break. That’s seven days, or 168 hours, to fill in your children’s holiday lives. Written down like that, it’s a lot – but if you knock 60 hours off for sleep, there are only 100 hours left to fill.
That’s easy, right?
Sure, you could go outside and follow some healthy alfresco pursuit but, let’s be honest, the weather’s likely to pack it in again and that could leave you scratching your head for ideas.
Pleasingly, there are now more options for genuine crossgenerational family viewing. But be warned, the following recommendations only fill six hours and two minutes.
Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King is a fantastical romp that more than ticks all the family boxes, delivering a modern-day take on Arthurian legend, complete with good wholesome fun.
Starring motion-capture god Andy Serkis’ son, Louis, the film is about an everyday kid who discovers he is the key to saving the planet from the clutches of an evil sorceress after he plucks an Excalibur-style sword out of a stone.
With an empowerment message for the kids, and some commentary on the global conditions of woe for the adults, this latest riff on the legend delivers thrills and fun with heart.
It helps that The Kid Who Would Be King feels like the kind of film you’d have watched with family on a Saturday evening years ago. There’s a swathe of nostalgia to bathe in, but the film feels contemporary enough to appeal to a younger generation with its requisite thrills ’n’ spills mentality.
It’s not the only crossgenerational movie Hollywood has launched to tackle the tricky family market.
Bumblebee is much more than just the latest Transformers movie.
Scarred from years of filmmaker Michael Bay’s camera leering over whatever leading lady he’s chosen to be part of the franchise, the movies were in desperate need of a less noisy reboot.
They got that with Travis Knight’s take on the whole kidbefriends-an-alien-trope, which was a mainstay of 1980s films such as ET.
As a result, Bumblebee was one of the surprise films at the end of last year. It offered escapism as well as a mum and dad-friendly soundtrack featuring classic Tears For Fears, Duran Duran and Simple Minds (as well as a cheeky homage to The Breakfast Club).
But if you don’t want to venture outside to a cinema, Netflix has the solution – Back To The Future.
Sure, you’ve seen it, but the purity of its plot and the simplicity of its execution have made it a stone-cold classic, loved by all generations.