You’re really not going to believe this, warden, but some nut has just tunnelled his way into Shawshank Prison
starring starri in the role of Sheldon and Wilkes Wilke as Brexit. A fairfa few respondents went for The RoRoad, a bleak, dystopian tale set in a babarren future world where the protagonists protag spend much of the film wondering wond if it would be better just to kill themselves. But, as one guy pointed pointe out, the Brexit version would “have fewer jokes and no happy ending”. endin (Spoiler – The Road does not no have a happy ending.) A couple of folk went for Heaven’s Hea Gate – Peter Morgan on the groundsg that “it goes on forever forev and nobody knows what’s going goin on”, while David Poole pointed out that the film was “a bloated, gargantuan mess with a self-important narcissist director that consumed vast amounts of money, destroyed the careers of everyone involved and proved to be a colossal waste of time and effort”. (I felt it was a strong contender because the three-and-a-half-hour epic also bankrupted the studio, United Artists.)
Chris James suggested Jurassic World for the simple reason that “it’s total s**t”. Gus Ironside chimed in to brilliantly point out that the film also featured “untold carnage inflicted by crazed dinosaurs”. By this point, I was having way more fun with my replies than anyone had had with Johnson’s original gag. I was thinking Johnson needed to employ some of these people to write his speeches. And still they came…
One of my favourites was from Howard Smith, who nominated The Wicker Man as it features: “A creepy cult led by an upper-class maniac with wild hair running a small island. Ends in flames and death.”
An awful lot of people went for disaster movies: Titanic, The Towering Inferno and Threads, the brilliant low-budget British film from the 80s that portrays Britain during and after a nuclear attack.
There were also more than a few votes for The Italian Job because, as someone pointed out, it featured a group of “bumbling idiots” who go to Europe and “think they’ve pulled it off but are left teetering on the precipice”.
Charles McClellan went for Deliverance, where “global Britain sets off into the wilderness, up s**t creek without a paddle”.
A fellow called Ollie suggested the Avatar sequels: “Millions upon millions spent on a fantasy project no one really wanted and most people just wish would go away.”
Steve Sweet nominated Police Academy 6: City Under Siege. His reasoning? It was “pointless, repetitive and never-ending”, with “terrible acting and a predictable plot, panned by all commentators and made you want to gouge your eyes out – yet you know there’ll be an even more dire sequel”.
But Buck Tarbrush took the gold medal with his nomination of The 51st State. You may not remember the film. It was an appalling 2001 “action comedy” starring Samuel L Jackson and Robert Carlyle that tanked at the box office.
Buck made the point that it had “a laughably ludicrous plot involving unintentionally comedic and deeply unsavoury characters” that was “targeted at the working class but conceived by stiff suits with no grasp of reality” and was full of “monumentally stupid moments and famous names all doing it purely for the money”. Hard to top that one.
But, after reading all of these, I’d begun to think that maybe there was something in Johnson’s original comparison after all. Brexit was like The Shawshank Redemption, if Andy Dufresne had spent the entire movie tunnelling INTO Shawshank prison. If he had crawled through a river of filth (of lies and racism and faux outrage) in order to give up his freedom of movement and spend the rest of his days in a far bleaker place than he began.
You were right, Boris. You just got it the wrong way around.