Alan Partridge

Year 15, Day 247 - 9/4/23 - Movie #4,537

BEFORE: I didn't get to take the weekend off, because yesterday I worked a 12-hour shift at the theater, co-managing two screenings of "Long Live Love", which is an apparently very popular Thai film, about a man who treats his wife and daughter horribly, and then has an accident and gets amnesia and as he tries to learn again who he was through photographs, figures out that he was a horrible person and resolves to treat his family better in the future.  Yeah, I guess that's a very popular romance storyline in Thailand -

Monica Dolan carries over from "Empire of Light".

THE PLOT: When famous DJ Alan Partridge's radio station is taken over by a new media conglomerate, it sets in motion a chain of events which see Alan having to work with the police to defuse a potentially violent siege. 

AFTER: I've watched a bunch of Steve Coogan films over these past few years, from "Greed" to "Stan & Ollie", even "Tristram Shandy", and of course he's made appearances in the "Night at the Museum" franchise films, and also the "Despicable Me/Minions" movies.  Hell, I even watched "Hamlet 2" and I might be the only person who did - but I've never watched anything where he's played his recurring "Alan Partridge" character, it seems there are 47 different TV series that aired on the BBC where the character is up to something new, they date back to 1991 and I guess he was a fake "chat show" host at first, then later the character was in a sitcom where he got sacked from the telly and dumped by his wife, and moved to a trailer park near Norwich, where he then worked as a radio host during the graveyard time-slot.  The character stayed on the radar for a few years due to fake autobiographies and various mockumentaries, while Steve Coogan also appeared in other projects, like "Philomena" and "24 Hour Party People". 

This 2013 film, originally subtitled "Alpha Papa", whatever that means, brought the character back in a big way, leading to the character's eventual return to TV with a spoof current affairs show, "This Time with Alan Partridge", in 2019.  But for today's film, which turned out to be a perfect film for Labor Day (or "Labour Day" in the U.K., but do they even have this holiday?) because it deals with the radio station where he works being bought by a large media company, and they decide to cut the staff, leading one of the DJs to take over the station with a shotgun and hold hostages.  Well, technically that's a labor dispute, so my instincts to program this one today were accidentally spot on.  

There really shouldn't be anything funny about someone bringing a gun to work and holding hostages, but then, that's the challenge, isn't it?  If you can make comedy out of THAT, you can make comedy out of just about anything.  Alan Partridge, of course, is secretly responsible for things descending into chaos, because he found out that the corporate board's choice of whom to fire was between Pat Farrell and him, so although he burst into their meeting with the intent of sticking up for Pat, when he learned that would mean his own neck was on the chopping block, he changed his tune very quickly.  Then he tried to blow Pat off as he was packing up his things, either because he felt guilty over the situation, or perhaps just because he was being an arsehole. 

However, when Pat takes over the station, the police enlist Alan's help as a hostage negotiator - what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  So Alan's got to get back into the station, gain Pat's trust, and report the situation back to the cops, while looking for ways to possibly defuse the situation or disarm Pat. So yeah, he ends up playing both sides off against each other, of course.  But at least he and Pat get control of the airwaves for a few hours so they can put on their own favorite music and do their comedy bits together.  Meanwhile the police try a new tactic, sending in a police officer disguised as a pizza delivery man, with a taser hidden in one of the boxes, for Alan to use.  Naturally, this is the pizza that Pat ends up taking for himself, so the ruse doesn't work. 

The siege becomes national news, and freeing the hostages only allows Pat and Alan to escape on the radio station's mobile broadcasting bus, which takes them to one of those famous U.K. pier-based amusement parks for the final showdown.  The police snipers surround the renegade broadcasters, but then the question remains - which DJ do the police hate more, the one who took the station hostage, or the one who was supposed to be on their side, who was proven totally inept at defusing the situation?  Well, at least in the fictional world Alan Partridge got back in the spotlight and got to keep his radio show, and in the real world Steve Coogan got to keep the character alive and add to his story.  

The original plan for this story was to have Middle Eastern terrorists hijack the BBC offices, but this probably was a wiser idea, to have the villain be a more sympathetic, down-on-his-luck radio host and have Big Corporate Radio be the real villain.  It's a tough challenge to take a TV character and build a big movie around them, the formula has really only worked out for Pee-Wee Herman and the cast of "Reno 911" unless I'm forgetting something. "South Park", maybe? "Downton Abbey"? Oh, right, and "Star Trek". 

Also starring Steve Coogan (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Colm Meaney (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Felicity Montagu (last seen in "Resistance"), Simon Greenall (last heard in "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon"), Sean Pertwee (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Anna Maxwell Martin (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Darren Boyd (ditto), Nigel Lindsay (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Karl Theobald (last seen in "Yesterday"), Simon Delaney (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Tim Key (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Phil Cornwell (last seen in "Cockneys vs Zombies"), Dustin Demri-Burns (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Simon Kunz (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Jessica Knappett, Kieran Hodgson (last seen in "The Flash"), Elizabeth Berrington (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Katie Males, Dan Mersh (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Lucy Briers (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Debra Stewart, Peter Singh (last seen in "Cruella"), Jayne Secker (last seen in "Kingsman: The Secret Service"), Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Robert Whitelock (last seen in "Hercules"), Martin Glyn Murray (last heard in "Enemy at the Gates"), and the voice of Darren Deans.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Large Questions