SO NERO, AND YET SO FAR...
Big screen outing for kids’ favourite is far from rotten but better scripts have been built in a day
AFTER ruling the children’s book charts for more than 20 years and dominating TV schedules for a decade, the Horrible Histories team have set their sights on conquering the big screen with this amiable lightweight romp around Roman Britain.
It’s enjoyable enough and sticks closely to a strategy which has served them so well in a lengthy campaign to subjugate the nation’s schoolchildren to the Horrible Histories’ super-successful brand of historical facts, bodily fluid jokes and knockabout songs.
Sebastian Croft and Emilia Jones are the pleasant and fresh-faced leads, with Croft playing a Roman teen sent to Britain as punishment only to be captured by Jones’s feisty Celtic wannabe warrior.
Well-known faces such as Nick Frost and Lee Mack pop up, although the bigger names such as Warwick Davis and Derek Jacobi have only cameo appearances.
Liverpool-born actress Kim Cattrall adds a touch of class as Emperor Nero’s mother, and is game for a laugh.
While her absence from the big screen
has been a loss for us all, at least this is closer to reality and a lot more fun than 2010’s Sex and the City 2. Considering the longlasting impact the gadabout and bloodthirsty Romans had on Britain, and of which we have exhaustive knowledge, this movie is never horrible or historical enough.
It feels as if a TV episode’sworth of material has been stretched to fill the movie’s length, with the script failing to up its game to compensate for the lack of a Hollywood budget.
With crushing inevitability, the best gag is a riff on Kirk Douglas’s Roman gladiator classic, Spartacus, and with the rest of the jokes relying heavily on a mix of music and teenage hormones, quality-wise this feels more like a kid-friendly Carry On Cleo.
Or it could possibly be retitled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sixth Forum.