Harry Hill is and always has been a little bit like Marmite - you either like him or you hate him. The same can be said for The Harry Hill Movie.
Harry Hill has always done surreal comedy, that's given, even back in the days when he was on Channel 4. In more recent times he became even more well known for TV Burp, which itself ran for 10 years and made Hill even more of a mainstream celebrity.
Of course, having a successful show like TV Burp means anything you do afterwards is going to get compared to it. Including this film. Large chunks of the film are typical skits that with the right linking material wouldn't look out of place on TV Burp.
The film's basic storyline essentially boils down to: Man takes dying hamster to Blackpool. Man's brother, who is into taxidermy and also a bit on the weird side, wants his brother's hamster to stuff. That premise stretches itself for 85 minutes - painfully. Not even the presence of Julie Walters, former Little Britain comedian Matt Lucas and the voice of Johnny Vegas can save this.
Simon Bird features in this movie and can now have been said to have gone from one extreme to the other - his appearance in the excellent The Inbetweeners to his lacklustre own creation The King Is Dead (thankfully didn't last more than one series) and now Harry Hill Movie, which is only a step up from King is Dead due to the fact the movie had a bigger budget and was a better end production.
There's a few things that could have worked better than they did but the end result appears to be a film made for the sake of making a film. The storyline starts off daft and gets dafter as the film progresses, ultimately concluding with a near obligatory final dance-off for no apparent reason.
Harry Hill can do far better than this. Absolute die-hard Hill fans and those who loved, cherished and adored TV Burp will probably get a kick out of this but everybody else will just wonder what on earth is going on.
Harry Hill has always done surreal comedy, that's given, even back in the days when he was on Channel 4. In more recent times he became even more well known for TV Burp, which itself ran for 10 years and made Hill even more of a mainstream celebrity.
Of course, having a successful show like TV Burp means anything you do afterwards is going to get compared to it. Including this film. Large chunks of the film are typical skits that with the right linking material wouldn't look out of place on TV Burp.
The film's basic storyline essentially boils down to: Man takes dying hamster to Blackpool. Man's brother, who is into taxidermy and also a bit on the weird side, wants his brother's hamster to stuff. That premise stretches itself for 85 minutes - painfully. Not even the presence of Julie Walters, former Little Britain comedian Matt Lucas and the voice of Johnny Vegas can save this.
Simon Bird features in this movie and can now have been said to have gone from one extreme to the other - his appearance in the excellent The Inbetweeners to his lacklustre own creation The King Is Dead (thankfully didn't last more than one series) and now Harry Hill Movie, which is only a step up from King is Dead due to the fact the movie had a bigger budget and was a better end production.
There's a few things that could have worked better than they did but the end result appears to be a film made for the sake of making a film. The storyline starts off daft and gets dafter as the film progresses, ultimately concluding with a near obligatory final dance-off for no apparent reason.
Harry Hill can do far better than this. Absolute die-hard Hill fans and those who loved, cherished and adored TV Burp will probably get a kick out of this but everybody else will just wonder what on earth is going on.