Pretty pointless and unfunny fare

bob the moo

Teenagers Kevin and Perry are desperate for sex.  When they hear that Ibiza is a free love-in for all involved they immediately want to go.  This desire becomes evens stronger when word of their virginity gets out.  When a rare act of community spirit brings them a reward and praise from Kevin's parents they get to go.  When they arrive they meet the girls of their dreams (who ignore them) and get their break with a superstar DJ (who abuses them). However despite stresses on their friendship, a possible record deal and amateur pornography shenanigans, all that really matters is, will Kevin and Perry get laid?

As many failed spin-offs from Saturday Night Live can easily contest, making a popular short sketch into a feature length film is no easy task.  What can work well in a 3 minute, one joke sketch does not easily translate to the big screen.  While there are a few well known successes, there are more that fail.  That is the case here in a film that almost takes a step backwards from the focus on all manner of teenager faults in the sketches to focus just on sexual jokes.  The plot is pretty banal to be honest and you would be forgiven for thinking there wasn't one at all.  All it is, is a long excuse for a lot of smutty humour and toilet jokes.  Some of them are funny but most of them are just stupid or silly.  Sadly the weakest of them (the instant erections) is repeated endlessly throughout the film.  Any genuinely funny bits are lost in a sea of floaters, erect penises and vomit jokes.

I wondered what had gone wrong at the script stage.  To develop a sketch into a film it is important to develop the character – where Kevin and Perry were teenage stereotypes in the sketches, this wouldn't work in the film. However the film goes backwards by not developing the characters but instead just piling on their sexual obsession.  They attempt to `develop' their characters by having touching moments but none of these work despite the fake way in which they try to put emotion into the scenes.

The soundtrack may be considered good by those who frequent Ibiza.  I am not a clubber person and prefer hip-hop to dance by and large, so to me the constant dance music was quite annoying at best and numbing at worst. However my real beef with this film music wise was the use of Barber's Adagio for Strings.  Adagio is one of my favourite pieces of classical music (probably best known in films to be the music to which Willem Dafoe strikes that iconic image in Platoon) and to hear it used over such trivial material just breaks my heart.

The cast is so-so on paper but never rises above the material.  Enfield has no one to blame but himself as ex-producer and writer.  He is less annoying as Kevin here than he was in the sketches which is good but he still can't get beyond the thin character he created for his tv show.  Burke is quite good and is a convincing boy.  Ifans is as annoying as ever and is the bad guy of the piece I suppose.  Some of the cameos are quite amusing but only Paul Whitehouse got a smile out of me.

Overall this is as poor as I had feared it would be.  I'm not against crude humour (I liked the Ali G movie for god's sake) but it needs to be funny and free flowing.  Here this film gets stuck in a rut of repetitive sexual jokes that aren't funny the first time round, the plot is meaningless and barely important and it is telling that the film could barely make it to 75 minutes.  In the filing cabinet where TV spin-off movies are kept, file this one under P for Pointless.

score /10

bob the moo 17 May 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0658680/