Do you remember how last week I suggested that Sex Tape might prove to be the worst movie of the year? Well – hold the phone! Another one has come in even lower!
The only positive thing that I can think of to say about this excruciatingly awful piece of copper-and-kettle Irish gormlessness is that it more than thoroughly lives up to its cringeworthy trailer.
The film, I’m told, is a spin-off from a hugely successful television show – I am not familiar with it, which proves, if nothing else, that ignorance can be bliss after all. Brendan O’Carroll plays Agnes Brown, a fruit-and-veg stallholder at a street market in Dublin.
I’ve never really understood the appeal of middle-aged men in frocks. Even Edna Everidge – notwithstanding Barry Humphries’s scintillating wit – is beginning to appear embarrassingly anachronistic. Unlike Dame Edna, O’Carroll’s alter ego is a smoking and swearing heroine of the working class. She takes on the Big End of town to campaign against crude Russian investors whose development plans have no place for Agnes and her fellow street vendors.
Helping Agnes are her idiot family and the members of a school for blind ninja students – yes, blind ninja students. Benny Hill might have been able to get away with it in a five-minute sketch… but really?
Do the distributors who determine what cinemas will screen to their punters take it as a given that we who live outside the major metropolises are complete hayseeds with the intelligence of gnats?
And, more to the point, surely there are any number of wannabe writers and directors in Oz who could come up with something as woeful as this. Why do we need to import such crud?
I was so mortified by this movie’s bone-headed stupidity, so dispirited by its insulting banality that I could not even muster the will to walk out.
~ John Campbell
