All you need to know about this cynical, brilliantly acid satire on the lying and blundering that preceded the invasion of Iraq, is that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's erstwhile chief spin doctor, hated it.
A feature-length spin-off
of the acclaimed BBC television series
The Thick Of It,
it's a pitch-black twist of
Yes, Minister
which is - be warned - gleefully and relentlessly foulmouthed.
Most of the profanity pours from the lips of Malcolm Tucker (Capaldi), whose characterisation doubtless explains Campbell's disapproval: the principal adviser to the PM (who is never seen), he enforces - indeed seems to determine - the will of Downing St with the rhetorical equivalent of a pistol-whipping.
"Do nothing," he tells a blundering cabinet minister in one of the few lines that can be reproduced here in full. "You stay detached, or else that's what I'll do to your retinas."
As the British and American Governments gear up to invade an unspecified country in the Middle East, Tucker is trying to manage the political fallout. But his job is made catastrophically more difficult when the Minister of International Development, Simon Foster (a marvellously hazy Hollander), gets caught in a soundbite describing war as "unforeseeable". Never mind that the utterance is meaningless: the departure from the deliberately opaque official line earns Tucker's wrath, and Foster's attempt to rescue the situation makes matters worse.
Unfortunately for Foster, his vagueness attracts interest in the US where both hawks and doves see him as an ally. Before long the minister is the meat in a transatlantic sandwich and at risk of becoming collateral damage in the internecine strife in Washington.
The pace slackens slightly in the last quarter and there's a tonal shift which doesn't seem intentional, as if the makers are getting bogged down in the longer format.
But the plot has precisely as many twists and turns as it ought to; the breakneck script has more lines than two normal films; the performances - The
Sopranos
' Gandolfini as a lubricious and slightly loopy Pentagon general; Addison as an eager and inept new ministerial staffer; Woods as a deliciously sycophantic State Department policy wonk - are pitch-perfect. What's not to like? Go immediately. But prepare to laugh until you weep.
Peter Calder
Cast
: Peter Capaldi, Chris Addison, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, David Rasche, James Gandolfini, Mimi Kennedy, Zach Woods
Director
: Armando Ianucci
Running time
: 106 mins
Rating
: R13 (offensive language and sexual references)
