Can a film faithfully recreate that car-crash Andrew interview? NO SWEAT!
Half an hour in, a key character in Scoop offers this insight into how television can transform how a news story is perceived: ‘An hour of television can change everything – it’s like magic.’ Unfortunately for Prince Andrew, his hour of television, the now notorious car-crash interview with Emily Maitlis on BBC2’s Newsnight in 2019, only changed things for the worse… the much, much worse. Scoop is the story of how this ill-advised venture, one of the great public relations disasters in recent history, came to pass.
Be gently warned, it’s not quite the film that many of us are expecting, in that neither the prince, played here with jowly conviction by Rufus Sewell, nor Maitlis (Gillian Anderson, arguably sounding more like Margaret Thatcher) are entirely centre stage.
No, the main character turns out to be the virtually unknown Sam McAlister, a maverick interview booker at Newsnight who normally turns up late, is snarkily described as ‘more
Daily Mail than BBC’ by jealous colleagues and arrives for her first meeting at Buckingham Palace wearing snakeskin boots.
Quite how she lands the interview of her career is not entirely clear, but it could be as simple as Amanda Thirsk – the prince’s beleaguered private secretary, and a woman who had already spent years trying to shake off the PR damage done by the prince’s friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – rashly replying to one of McAlister’s many emails saying: ‘We need to talk.’
Billie Piper, as McAlister, and Keeley Hawes, as the over-loyal Thirsk, are quietly terrific in their respective roles.
Director Philip Martin builds the tension effectively, and when the big day finally arrives all the vital ingredients are there – the prince’s misguided insouciance, his infamous inability to sweat and the now legendary role played by Woking Pizza Express.
The First Omen is a prequel to the much-loved 1976 horror classic, The Omen, which introduced the world to Damien, aka, well, the Antichrist.
And if we didn’t know that, the new film is topped and tailed by an opening scene that plays on the memorable death of Father Brennan, played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton in the original, and an ending that… no, no, the last lap is the best part of the new film. It wouldn’t be fair to spoil it.
But what comes in between bears such a resemblance to Sydney Sweeney’s recent horror, Immaculate, released only a fortnight ago, that it’s uncanny.
Novice American nun arrives in Rome? Tick. Discovers strange goings-on at convent? Tick.
True, Immaculate didn’t have Bill Nighy playing a cardinal but, that apart, the familiarity is certainly unfortunate.
I’m not wild about the title of Monkey Man, which is taken from Indian mythology, or some aspects of the storytelling, but Dev Patel makes a hugely impressive directorial debut with this, a revenge-based action thriller set in a modern India positively pulsing with life, energy and violence.
It’s a little derivative, with a screenplay good-humouredly acknowledging a debt to John Wick, but the sheer cinematic swagger is a joy to behold. Patel, who stars as well, was clearly paying attention when he made his big-screen debut in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.
Here he’s playing Kid, who scrapes a living as an ineffective wrestler who fights in a monkey mask but dreams, we think, of bettering himself. But when he lands himself a job at an exclusive club we soon learn that it’s not so much money he’s after as revenge. Be warned, that 18 certificate is fully deserved.
Seize Them!, a film very much in the mould of Horrible Histories but with added swearing, is set in a Dark Ages Britain where young Queen Dagan, portrayed here as a right little madam by Sex Education star Aimee Lou Wood, has just been deposed by the people’s champion Humble Joan, played by Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan. It has its comic moments, but sadly not enough of them.
The Trouble With Jessica feels like a stage play, in that much of the action takes place on a single set – the smart kitchen-diner where a troubled couple with serious money problems are having their last dinner party before their beloved London house is sold – while the ensuing drama hinges on what happens when one of the guests suddenly dies.
A classy transatlantic cast led by Alan Tudyk, Shirley Henderson, Olivia Williams and Rufus Sewell (yes, again) ensure that it’s always watchable, but director and co-writer Matt
Winn can’t decide whether he’s made a farce or a domestic drama or, indeed, why we should go and see it in the cinema.