We need to talk about Jamie... he’s lost on the small screen
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (12A, 115 mins)
Verdict: Energetic but flimsy ★★✩✩✩
Gunpowder Milkshake (15, 114 mins)
Verdict: Borderline offensive ★✩✩✩✩
ABBC documentary ten years ago, with the arresting title Jamie: Drag Queen At 16, inspired an effervescent West End musical which in turn has now inspired a film. If you haven’t seen the stage show, you might enjoy it. But if you have, as I have (and loved it), I think you’ll find the film a frustrating experience.
Of course, it could be that folk once said the same about West Side Story and The Sound Of Music, other theatrical hits that wound up in cinemas and became enduring classics.
But Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is an Amazon Prime Video release, and from where I was sitting in my living room — Row A, Seat 1 — most of the qualities that make it work so joyously on stage undermine it on the small screen.
Still, first things first. The story is unusual, but uncomplicated. Jamie (newcomer Max Harwood) is 16, living in Sheffield with his adoring single mum (Sarah Lancashire), but craving the approval of his estranged dad (Ralph Ineson).
At his comprehensive school, everyone knows he’s gay. In any case, there isn’t a closet big enough to hide him. Jamie is flamboyantly camp, and secretly yearns to be a drag queen.
He gets support from his mum, his best friend Pritti (Lauren Patel), and a retired drag artist once known as Loco Chanelle (Richard E. Grant, with licence to ham).
The story’s antagonists are his dad, the school bully (Samuel Bottomley) and an uptight teacher (Sharon Horgan). Will Jamie win round the naysayers? Will he, by expressing his true self, come of age? And will he and everyone else break into song at every opportunity? I think you know the answers.
On stage, all this overflows with exuberance. That the characterisation is thin at best, the drama overblown, the trajectory predictable, somehow just adds to the fun.
DIRECTOR Jonathan Butterell and writer Tom MacRae, both of whom crafted the stage show, do their best to reproduce its irresistible zest. But from the start the film, for all its pounding energy, feels artificial, flimsy, a pale shadow both of the show and of a picture with a broadly similar narrative but a much more resounding punch, Billy Elliot — which as it happens generated the opposite effect, working better on screen than on stage.
BY THE way, Ralph Ineson — whose lot it is always to be tagged as big Finchy from The Office, no matter what else he does — also pops up in Gunpowder Milkshake, as a brutal gangster. But this Netflix film is all about its female characters, not the chaps. It is a feminisation of those bulletspraying, corpse-strewn allaction flicks best exemplified by the John Wick series, which is fine in theory, but director and co-writer Navot Papushado works so hard to make it look stylised and chic that it ends up looking cartoonish and silly.
A decent cast, well and truly wasted, is led by Karen Gillan as Samantha, an assassin whose mother (Lena Headey), also a cold-blooded killer, disappeared 15 years earlier. Sam now works for a sinister organisation called, almost inevitably in a film like this, The Firm. Paul Giamatti is their liaison man, who briefs her to catch a guy who has unwisely stolen The Firm’s money.
This leads her to an armoury disguised as a library, where weapons are cutely given the names of female authors (Sam is tooled up with a Jane Austen, a Charlotte Bronte, a Virginia Woolf and an Agatha Christie), and dispensed by shadowy characters played by Angela Bassett, Carla Gugino and Michelle Yeoh.
It’s all precisely as daft as it sounds, and the desperately self-aware directorial flourishes, culminating in a slow-mo massacre in a 1950s diner, give it a comic-book vibe that feels not just hollow but also borderline offensive. As for the determinedly quirky title... sorry, I just can’t be bothered.