Hugh Grant – The Magnificent 60s

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You believe a much-loved actor couldn’t possibly lead you so astray. You are determined to give him every chance to proof your instincts wrong. You turn off at 15 minutes, then you feel you’ve done him an injustice, after all he is a major figure making his directorial debut, shouldn’t you cut him more slack? You switch off again at 35 minutes and are hit by the same guilty feelings. So you stick it out till the end and what do you get? One decent sequence with JFK of all people berating our nincompoops for asking for a favor when in one of his most famous speeches he had pointedly said, “Ask not.”

Indulgence gone mad. Or, just another day in the wacky world of Netflix. Honestly, who in their right mind would greenlight the directorial debut of a television comic who has never made a movie, clearly doesn’t understand what makes a movie, and that a 90-minute picture needs a completely different approach to a 25-minute television episode, and as obviously couldn’t care less?

There’s enough to satirize in the world of business instead of some dumb satire about the creation of a cereal that defies convention. If it was such a massive success story why did it take so long so cross the Atlantic, a couple of decades as far as I’m aware. But then, over here, we were still struggling just to work out why we needed to buy a toaster when you could just toast bread under a grill.

Clearly, the director-star Jerry Seinfeld, who’s always been enamored of his own material, was bored with being so wealthy that he decided he would inflict his latest joke on a disinterested public. I own up to having been a big fan of the Seinfeld schtick of a show about nothing and perhaps that’s where he’s gone wrong here. Because this is about something. At the very least rivalry between two cereal giants.

But these two apparently great companies are run by people who don’t notice that the cleaner sticking his mop in your face has a camera attached to it and the guy appearing at an inappropriate time in your business strategy meeting has (wait for it) a camera attached to his vacuum.

Sure, Seinfeld has rounded up a bunch of his pals and you can spot the likes of Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy, Christian Slater and Jon Hamm. It says a lot for their acting intelligence that they all thought this was a humdinger. I did like Hugh Grant playing Tony the Tiger since he’s grown a lot better at making a fool of himself.

The bizarre aspect of the whole enterprise is that there’s certainly a truth here. Any new product can have significant effect on other players in the market. Here, it was milk and sugar. A breakfast item that does not require milk is going to damage sales of milk, forever associated with breakfast and as one of the characters so crassly puts it the first thing everyone ever drinks (birth is the clue in case you need that spelled out). Sugar is coyly referred to as the “white powder,” making a connection with that other well-known epidemic, and only in passing ruminating on the damage sugar has done to teeth, without making the obvious link between why milk, which is so good for you, is associated with sugar, which is so bad,

In the middle of it Seinfeld prances around like an inane cat, the same dry delivery that worked in in his series painfully not working here. Everyone else looks as though they are having such fun, like this is a pantomime and everyone can just, well jolly gee, over-act to their heart’s content.

This kind of picture is by now par for the course for Netflix. Hollywood had a name for this kind of movie. Vanity project. Usually, it was the price to pay for being contractually saddled with a star so big. Or, having been saddled with such a disaster, you could extract payment in the form of them making a film they had previously balked at. Sometimes, you end up doing both of you an enormous favor, The Sixth Sense, a colossal hit, the price Bruce Willis paid for his vanity project. Who says vanity doesn’t pay?

The galling part is that the fact that I’ve stuck through it will be notched up as a success by Netflix, added to the millions of other watched minutes by which the company determines a hit, rather than having some way of measuring how many switched off a sixth of the way through like I should have done.

I don’t even know why I’m giving it two stars. In terms of laffs, it’s got as many as Orgy of the Dead, my all-time stinker.

Avoid.

The only redemptive factor in this too-clever-for-its-own-good post-ironic mess is a gorgeous performance by Hugh Grant. The one-time romantic male lead has shorn the floppy locks, put to bed the trademark stumbling over words and taken to the dark side. From pantomime villain in Paddington 2 (2017), through small-screen A Very English Scandal (2018) and The Undoing (2020) to Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023), Grant has reinvented himself as a baddie par excellence.

If there is any justice in the world or, put another way, some Hollywood or streaming mogul wanting to cash in on an instantly attractive character, they should be thinking of a film or television series revolving around his wonderful Cockney billionaire criminal, the epitome of the diamond geezer. The moment he appears, about a quarter of the way in, the film lights up. When he departs, it falls flat again.

Not surprisingly, given it is the embodiment of the over-egged pudding. The movie’s idea of character depth is to make all-round thug Nathan (Jason Statham) a wine connoisseur. Statham’s done pretty well to turn from a supporting actor to lean B-movie (Crank, 2006) shoot-‘em-ups to second banana in big budget pictures like the Fast and Furious franchise and The Meg (you didn’t think Jason was the actual star, did you, when there was a monster the size of a city block on the loose). In growl and unshaven cheeks, he may look like Bruce Willis, but Bruce Willis he ain’t. And he ain’t Charles Bronson either, despite rolling the dice twice on The Mechanic( 2011 and 2016).

Whitehall mandarin Knighton (Eddie Marsan) calls on smooth operative Nathan (Cary Elwes), who spends a lot of time eating, to put together a bunch of government-sponsored crooks – Orson (Jason Statham), Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) and JJ (Bugzy Malone) – to find a stolen artefact and prevent it being sold on to international gangsters or terrorists. Only problem is, nobody knows what was stolen. But somebody must know its value because another gang, led by turncoat Mike (Peter Ferdinando), is chasing the same item.

There’s a ton of computer jiggery-pokery that mostly gets in the way but suffice to say top-ranked crook Greg (Hugh Grant) is seen as being at the centre of whatever is going on, whatever that is, your guess is as good as mine. Lo and behold – what larks! – there’s a dead easy way to get inside Greg’s fortress (a giant ocean-going yacht): he is a huge fan of action star Danny (Josh Hartnett) who is recruited to play himself (a conceit too post-ironic for simple irony).

For a man as rich as Greg and as generous – he raises money for war orphans – Greg keeps poor company and consequently leads Nathan’s team to their prey, cueing burglaries, chases, fisticuffs. But most of the excitement is undercut by the aforementioned jiggery-pokery. It’s hard to concentrate on the action if every two seconds Nathan or Sarah is listening to a voice in his ear or we are being told by a third party that such some cute implausible jiggery-pokery is simplifying their tasks.

There are some electrifying sequences: the opening robbery taking place to the sound of Nathan’s footsteps echoing along a long marble hallway; a burglary where the occupants, rendered unconscious by jiggery-pokery, are so out of it Nathan can remove rings from fingers and watches from wrists.

But all the time this ultra-clever stuff is going on you just wished director Guy Ritchie (Wrath of Man, 2021) would have the sense of turn the camera back on to the one real characters in the ensemble, Greg, who doesn’t need anyone whispering in his ear or rely on jiggery-pokery to get through a scene.

Two brilliantly-scripted scenes demonstrated the talent gap between Grant and Statham. Nathan has his eye on Sarah and the scene between them where he imagines an immediate sexual connection is toe-curlingly superb. Nathan has a scene where, confusingly, he answers “yes” to each of Nathan’s questions and it comes off like a guide in how not to play comedy.

I’m not usually one to thank streaming giants for putting cinema-ready material on the small screen, but here I’m pretty grateful for saving me the expense. I’d seen a trailer for this months ago and thought it sounded pretty good. But if I’d seen it at the cinema I’d have been far more disappointed given the time and effort involved. As it was, I could stop the show and go back to watch the Hugh Grant scenes.

The concept could have been an ideal picture if it had come down to a more bare-bones story of two jumped-up thugs trying to gain the upper hand. I feel sorry for Statham. If Hugh Grant hadn’t delivered such a terrific performance, he wouldn’t have the movie stolen from under his feet. Two one-time big stars, Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, 1987) and Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down, 2001) play against type while Aubrey Plaza (Emily the Criminal, 2022), mostly loaded down with exposition, sparkles.

Watch it for Hugh Grant.

Tag: Hugh Grant

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