Directed by Edward McHenry, Rory McHenry. Starring Ewan McGregor, Rosamund Pike, Alan Cumming, Timothy Spall, Tom Wilkinson, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Richard E Grant, Club, QFT, 97 minutes
It’s the second World War and the Nazis have successfully invaded Britain, where a noble few, led by a put-out Churchill (Timothy Spall) and a lovelorn farmhand (Ewan McGregor), are forced to retreat to Scotland for one last stand against the dreaded Hun.
This alternative history from twentysomething animators the McHenry brothers has been pitched as a British companion piece for Inglourious Basterds or Team America: World Police. Yet for all the cheeky plundering of history and the use of plastic marionettes, the devil-may-care, overstretched screenplay simply cannot compete with the wit of Messrs Parker or Tarantino.
Fans of the Cartoon Network's adult-oriented strand, Adult Swim, are unlikely to mind too much; the filmmakers' scratchy action figure animatronics and their haphazard approach to humour place Jackboots on Whitehall firmly within the same demented subgenre as Robot Chickenand Action League Now!. In this spirit, parodies of everything from Braveheart to Zulu frame and punctuate each set piece and scene.
The end result is lunacy, of course, but who among us could argue with the searing camp of Alan Cummings’s Adolf Hitler or Richard O’Brien’s Heinrich Himmler? History Channel junkies may also get a kick out of Dominic West’s Billy Fiske and Richard Griffiths’ Hermann Göring.
The final credits note that “Many puppets were harmed during the making of this film”. They’re not kidding. Tally ho.
