Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2014)

Wonderful character development!

Very well executed

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Alan Partridge's radio station is taken over by a huge corporate media conglomerate, Pat Farrell is sacked for not being cool enough, he decides to hold a group including Partridge under siege in protest. Alan has to mediate between Pat and the Police.I'm a big fan of the TV series, it's always a worry how well a TV comedy translates to a film. Coogan is a fantastic actor, and Alan Partridge has been a big part of comedy culture for many a year. It's a very funny film, it's slick and the humour is effortless, it flies by so quickly, I really enjoyed it. As always poor LynneColm Meaney was utterly hilarious, funny man, goes without saying I enjoyed Steve Coogan too, his timing and facial expressions are genius, he's physically so funny too. Monica Dolan was as joyfully wonderful as ever.Well worth a look, 8/10

(53%) First of all I've never been a huge fan of the hapless broadcasting buffoon, his TV shows in the nineties were fine in small doses, but never anything I felt I must watch. So despite the good reviews I wasn't a big enough fan to grab myself a cinema ticket, and by and large in hindsight I'm glad I didn't. Not that this is a bad big screen effort, it's just that the show worked on subtlety with very little actually happening, this in an attempt to be more fitting for the big screen has tonnes, so something has been lost along the way; but then again the TV show was if anything a little too subtle and sluggish at times. Overall this is something that Partridge fans will cherish, but it doesn't do a great deal to win me over.

There is a problem with this movie: you will watch it probably only because you know the Alan Partridge TV show, but if you know the show, then you won't like this movie so much.It's comedy, but even a comedy must make some sense in order to be funny. The silliness of this story is so big, it overshadows the few jokes and since almost everything happens at just one place, it really drags.I don't get it: why not make a good movie using the successful concept of the original TV series, which made Alan Partridge and Steve Coogan so famous, with Alan as a TV host, interpolated with some moments of his private life? This should be done while Steve still isn't too "old" for that.

Directed by Declan Lowney, "Alpha Papa" stars Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge, a mean-spirited radio presenter. When a disgruntled man holds a local radio station hostage, Partridge uses the incident as a means of selfishly rekindling his career.You'd think "Alpha Papa's" premise allows for some biting satire in the vein of Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole", but no, Lowney and Coogan are uninterested in such things. Even as a black comedy, the film repeatedly chickens out. "Alpha Papa" should be vile, should be dark, but Lowney instead continually pulls away from all the film's brilliantly demented possibilities. Partridge hiding in a toilet like a swine, selfishly sacrificing co-workers, risking lives for fame...these are sequences which should paint Partridge as a magnificently despicable jerk. Instead the guy gets a redeeming ending, all his social ineptitudes are bizarrely ignored and everyone around Partridge gives him a free pass. Why?6/10 – See Coogan instead in the farcical "A Cock and Bull Story".