The Harry Hill Movie (2013)

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Good movie but grossly overrated

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Harry Hill is and always has been a little bit like Marmite - you either like him or you hate him. The same can be said for The Harry Hill Movie.Harry Hill has always done surreal comedy, that's given, even back in the days when he was on Channel 4. In more recent times he became even more well known for TV Burp, which itself ran for 10 years and made Hill even more of a mainstream celebrity.Of course, having a successful show like TV Burp means anything you do afterwards is going to get compared to it. Including this film. Large chunks of the film are typical skits that with the right linking material wouldn't look out of place on TV Burp.The film's basic storyline essentially boils down to: Man takes dying hamster to Blackpool. Man's brother, who is into taxidermy and also a bit on the weird side, wants his brother's hamster to stuff. That premise stretches itself for 85 minutes - painfully. Not even the presence of Julie Walters, former Little Britain comedian Matt Lucas and the voice of Johnny Vegas can save this.Simon Bird features in this movie and can now have been said to have gone from one extreme to the other - his appearance in the excellent The Inbetweeners to his lacklustre own creation The King Is Dead (thankfully didn't last more than one series) and now Harry Hill Movie, which is only a step up from King is Dead due to the fact the movie had a bigger budget and was a better end production.There's a few things that could have worked better than they did but the end result appears to be a film made for the sake of making a film. The storyline starts off daft and gets dafter as the film progresses, ultimately concluding with a near obligatory final dance-off for no apparent reason.Harry Hill can do far better than this. Absolute die-hard Hill fans and those who loved, cherished and adored TV Burp will probably get a kick out of this but everybody else will just wonder what on earth is going on.

I was quite looking forward to this film and I was very surprised to see how low it is rated on IMDb. On one hand I want to say that Hill's comedy can be quite niche so maybe people just didn't like him when he is on form, but then on the other, it is hard to call him an acquired taste when his brand of absurdity held court on Saturday night television for so many years. Anyway, the film has a typically silly plot as Harry believes his hamster has mere days to live and decides to give him his heart's desire – a trip to Blackpool (Harry cannot speak hamster, Abu actually wanted to meet Rihanna). Anyway, while Harry, Abu and his Nan sets off on their trip, they are pursued by two henchmen trying to kidnap Abu for the sinister motives of Otto, Harry's long lost brother (yes, it's an evil twin thing).I should really be target audience for this film – or at least I should have many more positive words for it than I have seen from others here. In some ways I do because I did like some of the absurd stuff and some of the set pieces that made me chuckle, but unfortunately they are hard to remember in the sea of those that did not. It is a problem with Hill's style of comedy, you really need to be in the mood for it and from his side it needs to be bang on the money or else it just seems silly and stupid rather than wonderfully absurd and imaginative. Rewatching his old Channel 4 show recently, he did manage to consistently hit the right side of that line but with this film too much of it is silly. Some of it might have worked were it not just so apropos of nothing – so bits that just get thrown in for almost no reason. Some of it is badly misjudged and "rapping nan" in particular is something that just should have been thrown out in the writers' room.The musical numbers have some energy but strangely no laughs at all; the carwash song with the woman from the Noisettes is fun but then other songs just seem to come from nowhere and go nowhere. I enjoy the Les Mis one but the more the film just piles on with references later on, the less it seems to work. Children will still like it and if you are a total fan of Hill's humor no matter whether it is good or not so good, then you may enjoy this, but otherwise it must be said that there is really too much silliness for the fewer actually good bits to overcome.

Excellent laugh. Why watch and rate this movie if you don't like "traditional" British non-sense surreal humor, which is genius just for its mere existence...: trying to set conventional logic and thinking on fire with the kind of best ever "freeforming" humor you would share with some friends after some drinks, creating ridiculous situations and characters.The people that made this movie, obviously, sincerely like and do want to entertain people, not indulge themselves achieving any high score on any commercially safe and traditional kind of humor. What here also should be mentioned is that the photography, cgi, mastering is of astonishing, much superior than expected level for a comedy-slash-musical- jokes&puppets-movie, which shows again the sovereignty that British filmmakers and broadcasters can flip out of their pocket without even taking it to serious themselves. I cant believe i nearly missed the laugh due to the ratings here, which from now on i surely wont take anymore as an orientation.

I only decided to comment after seeing someone compare it favorably with Norman Wisdom films! Norman was a comedy genius, outstanding in his time who outsold Bond films. Unfortunately, this messy little comedy is nowhere near that league. Aimed at a dumbed down audience, it grinds along like a stalled car being pushed. Frankly am amazed so many good actors chose to be in this, unless they felt HH might be flavor of the month due to his TV ratings. However, when reading the lines as though they were on a page, it beggars belief they signed up at all! What a fall. It's just daft, and in some places a bit crude. I got the feeling little to no thought went into the plot or story-line, and they hoped the actors presence alone could pull it off. Unfortunately, it falls flat. Very amateurish all around. The actors seem half asleep and the director could well be a chimpanzee! One of those, we hope the TV ratings mean this rubbish will sell, one-off jobs to make a quick buck. What a load of rubbish!