Prime Time: Greatest Days (2023)

A feature adaptation of a popular musical, originally titled "The Band", Greatest Days is all about female friendship, the moments that take you away from one another as you move from childhood to adulthood, and the music of Take That (with the band represented here by generic boyband types just collectively referred to as The Boys). You may already know whether or not you want to see it, but I hope this review might sway those undecided. It Only Takes A Minute or two to read.

Aisling Bea plays Rachel, a nurse who ends up stunned when she finds out that she's won a competition. The prize is a trip to Athens to see The Boys reunion concert live. She's allowed to take a number of friends with her, and she knows exactly who will want to enjoy the experience with her. But that means talking to them all again. It's been a long time since she spoke to those who used to be her firm childhood friends, and who shared her love of The Boys, but maybe it's time to reconnect and move beyond whatever made them so happy to lose touch with one another. Moving between the past and the present, we see how Rachel, Heather, Zoe, Claire, and Debbie once had their Greatest Days all planned out ahead of them. But something happened to take the Shine off things. Can the women relight their fire? Everything will be revealed by the third act, and viewers will just need a little Patience as the plot unfolds.

Written by Tim Firth (who wrote the stage musical and has helped write a few different highlights of British cinema, mainly Calendar Girls and Kinky Boots), Greatest Days is predictable and emotionally manipulative stuff, and I'm not saying that as a criticism. Once you get used to the style of the film, the leads often slip into fantasy sequences in which The Boys sing and dance around them to help them escape their more depressing thoughts, it's easy to enjoy the characters, the dialogue, and the songs. Because, like them or not, Take That have a good selection of songs that people of a certain age will always have seared into their brains.

Director Coky Giedroyc has a large number of TV credits to her name, but she's no stranger to feature films. She does an excellent job here, having fun with the warmth and camaraderie of the characters, as well as nicely juxtaposing the song and dance moments with the more mundane reality being interrupted. There's a sprinkling of something special over the whole thing (Could It Be Magic?), helped by a winning cast who all seem to enjoy interacting with one another, even when the characters aren't staying on friendly terms.

The younger cast members have the better moments, helped by the fact that they aren't weighed down by the problems and responsibilities of adulthood, but there's no weak link in the chain. Bea and Lara McDonnell take on the lead role, the latter a highlight as the younger incarnation of the former, but Alice Lowe, Jayde Adams, Amaka Okafor, Carragon Guest, Nandi Hudson, Eliza Dobson, and Jessie Mae Alonzo are equally well-suited to their roles. Despite the film being focused on women, and the stronger bonds and strains of female friendship, it's a pleasant surprise that Marc Wootton gets to play arguably one of the nicest movie boyfriends ever. He makes a couple of mistakes, but generally tries to do what he thinks is best for the woman he loves, and it may be the first time I have actually liked Wootton onscreen for the entire duration of one particular performance.

I had heard some good reviews of this already, and I am always willing to watch Alice Lowe in anything, but this was much better than I expected it to be. I laughed, I was tapping my toes along to the tunes, and I even shed a tear or two before the end credits rolled. If I convince anyone to give this a try, and if they react as I did, then I only hope that they Never Forget where they get the best movie recommendations.

7/10

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Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)

I was very confident, very confident, waving everyone away who tried to warn me off this movie. Because it couldn't be any worse than some of the other Home Alone movies, could it? Could it?

The simple answer, which I can put at the start of this review, is no. Home Sweet Home Alone is not worse than some of the other Home Alone movies. It's also not very good though, and it's not very good in ways that are quite mind-boggling.

Here's the plot. Archie Yates plays Max Mercer, a child who ends up home alone while his family have headed to Tokyo. He is also the prime suspect when Jeff (Rob Delaney) and Pam McKenzie (Ellie Kemper) lose a valuable doll that could see the end of their current money woes. Jeff and Pam believe that Max has stolen the doll, and Max is under the impression that Jeff and Pam are looking to kidnap him. Excessive snacking, lessons about home being where the heart is, and booby-traps are very soon the order of the day.

Written by Streeter Seidell and Mikey Day, and directed by Dan Mazer, there's nothing inherently wrong with the people making this movie. Their backgrounds tend to be based more in content such as SNL, Ali G, and other non-kid-friendly fare, but I didn't see their names and immediately worry about the film they would deliver. Perhaps I should have. The direction isn't terrible, not really, but the script is poor, especially when you consider some of the plotting that makes the viewing experience a difficult and unrewarding one.

Never mind though, because I really like Delaney and Kemper. So that should be a plus, right? It is, but not enough of a plus to make up for the big negatives. Delaney and Kemper aren't used well here, although I hate to think how much I would have hated this film with other people in their roles. Aisling Bea could have been another good bit of casting, but playing the mother of the child left at home alone simply leads to her feeling like a very poor replacement for the superb Catherine O'Hara. There are some other people doing perfectly fine work here, but that work is overshadowed by the central performance from Yates. I don't want to spend much time ripping apart the performance of a young child, and Yates is definitely not helped by a script that makes his character almost completely unlikeable throughout (when he isn't recreating moments from the first Home Alone movie). All I will say is that his character is one of the most irritating youngsters I have seen onscreen in a very long time, and I spent most of the movie hoping that he would end up caught in one of his own traps.

There's an argument to be made for this movie being even less deserving of your time because of how it seems to invert so much of what made the original film a holiday classic, and there's absolutely nothing here that actually feels good enough to warrant this reworking of the concept, but a level of general technical competence, as well as the presence of both Delaney and Kemper, stop it from being among the worst of the worst. It's really bad though, and this is coming from someone who often tries to see the best in every movie I watch.

3/10

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