BEFORE: Christopher Plummer carries over from "All the Money in the World", here he plays a prison warden (or "governor", as they call it over there, I think). I didn't really have a St. Patrick's Day film this year, because Captain Marvel, but at least this one has "Lucky" in the title, and the lead actor/lead character appears to be Irish, I'm afraid that's the best I can do this year.
BUT, it seems like I've cracked the code on linking, at long last. After I learned 2 days ago that I could neatly fit a planned documentary chain between "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" and "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and STILL maintain linking (which can get very tough with docs, though if I limit the docs to just a few basic themes, it actually gets easier) I set out to close the gap. So yesterday I found a linked path between "Avengers: Endgame" and "Dark Phoenix" that would take up the right number of days, and I landed on something. It wasn't perfect, it needed a little tweaking and a few additions, but I've now got a plan that will take me all the way to mid-July.
And, since I haven't had any breaks or relied on any indirect links so far in 2019, that means I COULD have an unbroken chain from January 1 to July 8 or so - that's 187 films, or thereabout. If I can keep it going to 200 films, that would be absolutely insane, right? At some point it becomes like a no-hitter in baseball, I'm not going to want to talk about it, but it WILL become the only thing that I can focus on, if I go 200 films without breaking the chain.
This could present me with a dilemma, once October rolls around - I've been forgiving myself some broken links in order to get horror or classic monster-movie films watched, like last year I allowed myself to link between two films with Dracula in them, because that's the same character, not necessarily the same actor. Should I do that this year with The Mummy? or should I only focus on some more modern scary films that share actors? Or should I take the whole month off this year, if I'm working on a "perfect game" and I don't want to allow a horror chain with broken links? I may have to decide in August or September how I'm going to handle this. More later.
THE PLOT: Under the leadership of a small-time bank robber, British inmates hatch a plan to escape by staging a musical.
AFTER: Outside of "Hogan's Heroes", I don't know too many comedies that are set in prisons. But leave it to the Brits, and the director of "The Full Monty", to turn this subject matter into something both funny and charming. This feels a lot like a British version of "The Shawshank Redemption", or perhaps it's more like if you turned a British sit-com (Brit-com?) like "Are You Being Served" into "Are You Serving Your Time"? It's got all the classic British comedy tropes, there are lower-class people (the inmates) and the upper-class (the warden and the guards) because really, everything in Britain is a class struggle, right? Geez, I'd consider this whole film to be a metaphor for Brexit if it hadn't been released in 2001, well before that word or concept ever existed.
At first it sounds a lot like the end of the movie "The Producers", when Bialystock and Bloom are sent to jail, and are last seen over-financing a new production called "Prisoners of Love", which the warden heavily invests in. Sure, there are some similarities, but this is a full-length film that riffs off the same idea, but then adds the whole plot about the inmates trying to escape during the performance.
Caught in the middle of the class struggle is Annabel, a woman who works at the prison as some kind of psychologist or anger-management consultant (and boy, some of those inmates sure need it...) but she finds herself falling for a failed bank robber named Jimmy Hands. AND since she's the only woman around, she's the natural choice to play Lady Hamilton in a staged musical based on the life of Lord Nelson, which the warden wrote and composed. It's all a big dodge, however, since the inmates are only producing the play to cover up an escape attempt, they've determined that the old chapel, where the musical would have to be staged, has the WORST security coverage, and the hour when all the guards and inmates will be watching the show would be the BEST time to cut throught the wires and slip a few actors out over the wall.
That's the plan, anyway, but of course nothing in a British comedy ever goes completely to plan, how else would everyone get an excuse to act all flustered and desperate? In this case a new, very dangerous inmate demands to be made part of the plan (though he's got, like, ZERO stage presence) and once Annabel figures out what's going on, it puts Jimmy in a quandary - should he get out the prison, live the rest of his life as a fugitive and lose the woman he loves, or turn back around, serve the rest of his sentence, and win her over?
I'm a bit surprised to find that this lead actor has never played Paul McCartney in any kind of biopic - his face really reminded me of McCartney (circa 1984, the whole "Give My Regards to Broad Street" era) and then when he sang, I also heard a similarity in his singing voice. Maybe I'm the only one who ever noticed this, or maybe someone felt that his Irish accent wasn't close enough to McCartney's Liverpudlian one.
I recorded this film off cable more or less at random, to fill up a DVD with "Baby Driver", and now I'm very glad that I did, it's definitely worth a look.
Also starring James Nesbitt (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "Peter Pan"(2003)), Timothy Spall (last seen in "Appaloosa"), Bill Nighy (last heard in "Norm of the North"), Lennie James (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Ron Cook (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), Frank Harper (last seen in "Bend It Like Beckham"), Raymond Waring (last seen in "24 Hour Party People"), Julian Barratt, Peter Wight (last seen in "Atonement"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Peter McNamara, Andy Linden, Ram John Holder, John Pierce Jones.
RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper hats
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