New Dad’s Army? Who do they think they’re kidding!
AS THoSe of us who are enduringly fond of the TV sitcom dad’s Army know, Mr Brown went off to town on the 8.21.
But watching this big- screen version is like him going off to town on the 9.45. Nearly the same, but disconcertingly different.
who did they think they were kidding, if they thought we’d warm to a new Home Guard platoon from walmington-on-Sea?
After all, the claim that it might attract a new generation of fans is surely deluded. who is most likely to want to see it, if not the old fans, from between their fingers?
For all that, though, oliver Parker’s film, while never reaching anything like the heights of the original at its glorious best, has the same sort of gentle charm and a few bursts of inspired physical comedy.
Nobody could ever make a better Captain Mainwaring than the late, great Arthur lowe, but Toby Jones pulls off t he pomposity, t he middle-class chippiness and, above all, the comic timing, to something close to perfection.
Parker has insisted that this is not a remake, more a modern re-imagining, which is why his walmington is populated by far more women t han it ever used to be. There are roles of varying meatiness f or Sarah lancashire, Annette Crosbie and Alison Steadman. However, he has rather undermined his own case by casting — if it’s not too irreverent to use a German word — a bunch of doppelgangers.
As well as J ones’s s hort, bespectacled Mainwaring, Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey and Tom Courtenay as lance Corporal Jones offer impressive approximations of Arnold Ridley and Clive dunn. Bill Nighy, on the other hand, playing Sergeant wilson, simply does his louche Bill Nighy act.
The action takes place in 1944, shortly before the d-day landings. If the Germans find out the Allied plans, they could still win the war.
So they send a spy to snoop out details of the invasion, who arrives in walmington at just the same t i me as a seductively sultry j ournalist called Rose winters (Catherine Zeta- Jones), claiming to be there to write a story about the local Home Guard.
The entire platoon is smitten, and not remotely suspicious of her motives when she insists on joining them on a patrol of the nearby invasion base — not even when MI5 report that a radio message has been sent from the town direct to Berlin.
So who i s the spy? you can probably hazard a wild guess.