A spinoff of The Thick of It that allowed for Veep to be produced, but overall is marred by pacing issues.
The political humor is still top notch. Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison riff off each other with vibes of The Office. However the 105 minute runtime exposes that this type of narrative caps out at the 60 min mark. There’s jokes that go on for far too long (Tucker running across London’s parliament to make a meeting, Tucker running across DC to make a meeting, Wright running across DC to make a meeting…), and dialogue that devolves to name calling immediately upon hitting a three minute mark. The crisp editing of a television series masks these issues for the audience. In addition, this movie occurs over a … 72–90 hour period (depending on the timezone). That’s literally 4 episodes of content crunched into a 90min movie format.
Continuing, the girl from My Girl (Anna Chlumsky) is all grown up and showcases how good of an improv actor she is, and why she was recast for a similar role in Veep. Zach Woods plays pretty much the same character from The Office (nerdy lanky guy) and appears to be typecast, and all of the supporting characters improve perfectly. There were elevated budgets for the production compared to The Thick of It, but ultimately lower budget than Veep. Therefore only negative thing again is the pacing. And its a heavy detraction from what would have been a classic film.
First screened November 27, 2023 on Tubi.
