Coogan in a camp carry on
I WAS hoping Ideal home would be a glorious romp in the world of designer interiors, but instead it turns out to be a gay parenting comedy starring Steve Coogan and Paul rudd.
‘ We can’t have kids,’ says rudd’s character. ‘We are kids.’
Coogan, who plays flamboyant television chef erasmus Brumble and rudd, who plays his bearded partner Paul, are suddenly landed with a ten-year-old boy.
The kid ( Jack Gore) is Brumble’s estranged grandson.
Will the couple give up their life of drink, drugs and decadence in fashionable Santa Fe to provide a decent home?
Or will the lad fit into a world where these grown men rarely get up before noon, and then mightily hungover?
leaving no camp cliché unturned, the film tries and fails to leap between Carry On-style english comedy and warm and fuzzy american emotion.
The boy upstages the adults in every scene, and requests Taco Bell takeaways from the celebrity chef. Paul refers to him as ‘that kid from The Shining’.
There are some laughs, but Ideal home feels embarrassingly outdated with its homosexual jokes and assumption that it’s a big deal for men to be parents.
This seems to be the season of the inadequate man- child movie, from last-week’s Tag to Swimming With Men, and it’s a genre wearing rather thin.