Back in Business (2007)

hyped garbage

Don't listen to the negative reviews

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

To compare Back in Business with a modern day Film is like saying that a child's homemade go-cart and a Ferrari are comparable as they both have wheels and are capable of independent movement. Back In Business is not a conventional film, per se. It's a product of old cinema which was more about outrageous exhibition as about story telling - It's a Mad (5) World, What's New Pussycat, Barbarella. They're big, flabby, self-indulgent, glorious messes that stand as social commentary as much as cinema.The in-jokes, the winking references, the cameos - all are used to great effect in Back In Business. Great music, great costumes, some good sets, wall of sound - all make Back In Business a little piece of 60s film-making for the modern day. Please don't watch it if you want to watch a competent and engaging movie - but do watch it if you want 90 mins of nostalgia and silliness and stupid enjoyment Then Enjoy This Film

Difficult where to start with this pig of a movie.... although it hasn't beaten the title of worse British movie ever (which I still believe 'Sex Lives of the Potato Men' will hold forever) it has little to recommend it.I caught it on a movie channel, and was interested only because Chris Barrie was in it. As a huge Red Dwarf fan, I look forward to see the actors in that appear in other things. He shone in the Tomb Raider movies as the groovy butler Hilary, so when I sat down to watch this film I expected great things.I certainly set myself up for a big fall. It comes to something that the only funny bits are the end credit bloopers.It just looked like cheap tat, and I thought the British Film industry had left this sort of weak stuff behind (see previous comment about the Potato Men) but this just lets old Blighty down.If any non Brit comes across this in the bargain bin or on a cable channel, don't judge us too harshly, we didn't know.... we are innocent.We need more Sexy Beasts and Lock Stocks and less of this insipid stuff.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning Britain has just invented a space exploration buggy named 'Explorer' that rivals anything the world's two space super-powers, America and Russia, have created. Spruce conman Will Spencer (Martin Kemp) plots to steal it, along with his old friend Tom (Chris Barrie), his computer whizz son Travis (Stefan Booth) and Will's niece Fiona (Joanna Taylor.) But Will's old adversary and now man-servant, Det Jarvis (Dennis Waterman) is determined to use the scam to bring him down and get back in the police force...or will he end up wanting in on the scam himself?The first I saw of this movie was a poster of it in a magazine that boasted it was 'one of the few films in recent years to achieve an 100% British grade' and that we should 'do our part to keep the British film industry thriving' and see it, even though I can't name a single cinema it was released in. In other words, the BFI is in such a bad state it's now trying to make us feel we have a duty to go out and see whatever rubbish it's responsible for! In these post Sex Lives of the Potato Men days though, I suppose that's something you could believe...The film was entirely British made, then, and I guess it shows all the way. Indeed, the film does look very cheap and the low budget is clear for all to see. And then there's the cast. Martin Kemp with a Cambridge accent?!? I struggled to keep a straight face through-out. I don't know if that's how Chris Barrie talks in real life, but I found it very annoying anyway. Then there's some ex-Hollyoaks actor who looks like he's wondered right out of panto which only adds to the cheapness of it all and as for Joanna Taylor, one of the things I learned from the film Shoot 'Em Up is if an actress isn't giving a particularly great performance it always helps if she has a nice pair of breasts to stare at instead of her face and, well, that works here. And finally, Dennis Waterman ('I could be so good for...a disgruntled ex police-man!!!') Apparently he gets annoyed at them taking the p!ss out of his voice in Little Britain but it sounds very weird here, like he's put a funny twang on it that makes it sound rather peculiar and unsettling indeed.A cheap and unfunny experience all round, then, that does no favours for the BFI and certainly none for us. *

Gone are the days when every new ITV drama came equipped with the words 'starring Martin Kemp', so the title of this new film applies as much to him as it does the pair of conmen reunited for the greatest job of their lives. Kemp is Will Spencer, working alongside his old partner, master of disguise Tom Marks (Red Dwarf's Chris Barrie) and his spectacularly incompetent son, Travis (Stefan Booth). Their ace in the hole, however, is Will's niece Fiona (Joanna Taylor), who works at the British Space Centre, where they've just developed a space buggy that could help solve planet's energy and ecological problems. This group of misfits and insiders plan to put themselves at the centre of Britain's major scientific breakthrough. Only Dennis Waterman as Jarvis - the Inspector Clouseau of Scotland Yard - can stop them.Back In Business is the kind of gentle family caper movie that used to be a staple of British cinema back in the days of the Boulting Brothers and Ealing Studios. Sadly, though, this has neither the wit nor insight into the social fabric of those golden movies. Instead we get an anodyne adventure that limps along with a bunch of performances that would be better suited to Sunday evening TV comedy dramas than the big screen. It may be a while before Martin Kemp can give up the sofa adverts...