Kids alright, but British comedy is stretched thin
In the British comedy “Get Duked!,” four misfit adolescents come face to face with a familiar existential threat: other people.
A three-minute cat-and-mouse cartoon optimistically stretched to feature length, the movie is loud, busy and cheerfully glib, though at one point — after the weapons and politics have been brandished — it takes a brief turn to sincerity. This doesn’t do much other than announce that it has more in mind than cliches and jokes about the lysergic dividends of rabbit scat.
There is nothing wrong with poop jokes except when they aren’t funny and, after the first pellet gag, the loamy possibilities of this source material diminishes. In the main, the humor in “Get Duked!” is more scattershot than scatological and leans hard on stupidity and the comedy of stereotypes.
The story’s pretext is an award named for the Duke of Edinburgh, aka Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Through a regimen of exertion and self-reliance (carry on, blah blah blah), teen applicants better themselves. Here, the four teens designated for self-improvement in the Scottish Highlands are Glaswegians. One is a nerd, and the other three are a typically mouthy, irreverent crew.
Their rough lives are telegraphed by their accents, haircuts, eye rolls and the plastic wrapped around one guy’s shoes. These three mostly serve as a foil to the earnest fourth, though they also are on hand to provoke, and then sucker punch, the audience’s class prejudices.
The party gets started after the kids are dropped off by a supervisor (Jonathan Aris) in the middle of the countryside. One of the naughty boys soon lights up a spliff rolled with a section of their only map — and they’re off.
Youth might be wasted on the young, but in movies it often is hijacked by adults who use young characters to work through their many, many anxieties about their past, their present and their alarming, fast-darkening future.
Given what happens, or rather doesn’t, for much of this movie, writer-director Ninian Doff doesn’t appear especially exorcised about anything too heavy. Mostly, he just winds these kids up and sets them loose in an exotic land, interrupting their stuttering progress with landscape beauty, intimations of more vehement violence and some playfully expressionistic hallucinations that allow him to show off his background in music video.
The scenery is pretty and the actors appealing enough to almost excuse the thinness of the material. And certainly the four leads — Viraj Juneja, Samuel Bottomley, Lewis Gribben and Rian Gordon — fill in their characters with personality that makes them recognizably, usefully human. By the time the masked, mysterious villains (Georgie Glenn and Eddie Izzard) materialize, the kids have stumbled into your sympathies.
The larger issue is that there isn’t enough story or filmmaking in “Get Duked!” to sustain its 87 minutes, and the ending is as preordained as the righteous lecture that is delivered in many movies when the exploited hero finally gets to tell off the baddies (the audience included, of course).