Dad's Army (2016)

I love this movie so much

Too much of everything

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

In the spring of 1944 a group of guardsmen protect the town of "Walington on the Sea." They take on aspects of the "Keystone Cops" as they fumble through their drills, lead by George (Toby Jones) "a man with vision" when he is wearing his glasses. When the refined Rose Wilson (Catherine Zeta-Jones) shows up as a journalist doing a story, the men fall all over themselves as the woman folk of the town work to protect their claim. Rose is a spy for the Germans, something two elderly women figure out early in the film.I liked the film because it reminded me of my own father who served in WWII, not in the front lines, but guarding the coast of North Carolina...but that didn't deter him from telling "war" stories. Today his tall tales would brand him as a liar and a disgrace to everyone who served, etc. But I still loved them. Bill Nighy did his type cast job as a former Oxford professor.The film had its humorous moments as the women come to the rescue.No swearing sex, or nudity.

Oh wow.Where to start?Awful plot, so bad and cringeworthy that it is not worthy of the term plot. There are the lame jokes which we expect, the prat falls which we also expect. What is missing is any sense of narrative.this is ninety minutes of my life I cannot get back..Don't bother.

I wanted to like 'Dads' Army'. I really did. It features some of my favourite British character actors, and brings to the big screen one of my favourite TV shows. Unfortunately, it's awful from start to finish. The slapstick is over-done and unsubtly telegraphed, the pacing uneven (verging on the near comatose, at times), the cinematography unimaginative, and – unforgivably, given the wealth of material they had as inspiration – the script is unbearably weak. Bill Nighy and Tom Courtney look unutterably bored, and Bill Paterson barely seems to have noticed that the camera is rolling. Michael Gambon and Toby Jones are clearly trying to make the best of a bad job, but they are aping the characterisations and physical mannerisms of Ridley and Lowe...and I expect better - MUCH better - from actors of their calibre. Awful. If they upped the pace and spent less time trying to add needless detail to the characters' back-stories (did we, for example, really NEED to see the good Captain's wife? – she had much more comic worth as an off-screen gorgon!) it might have been bearable. It isn't.Stupid boys!

...(pun definitely intended) to refresh such a seminal show as Dad's Army, but I think this turned out to be a genuinely likable film in the end.True, the script felt a little clunky at times, especially when the writers shoehorned in the catchphrases from the original show (a random single scene camera pan across the platoon where the only line is Jones saying "They don't like it up em!" being the most cringing). But, it was a nice counter-expectant touch to finally hear Jones utter the "Don't panic" line, but at himself, not Mainwaring. And the scene where the tanks turned out to be balloons was a deft nod of the head to some of the Allied tactics actually deployed in WW2.But then there were plot holes and obvious questions such as (using the tank scene again) how anyone believed there could be hundreds of real tanks at the top of the hill when the sheer noisy act of getting them there in the first place would have been heard in France, never mind the local village? Or the moment when Wilson and Mainwaring realised they were both hiding behind the furniture in the house of Catherine Zeta Jones' spy - wouldn't that be cause for further discussion between the two? Having said that, this was clearly produced as a nostalgic romp for those of us who remember the original series, and had no time to develop some of the clever intricacies we remember, so as such it didn't too bad a job.