Reviews

Back in the 60s this genre was handled best on the radio by I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. There have been several TV attempts to revive that format and this one gets it absolutely right. The best description I have seen is like a really fun dinner party. The quiz part is still central, the questions are real, the answers are real, the points scored are real, but the time is largely taken up by the banter triggered by the questions.

The questions frequently have obvious, "everyone knows", wrong answers which receive a klaxon and a big forfeit and triggering this is occasionally the point of the question.

You're sitting down for an evening with 5 really smart, really quick witted, really comical people playing the pub quiz from hell and you're along for the ride. Wonderful, and archetypally British, entertainment.

Some adult humour, some disrespectful humour, some irreverent humour, lots of good natured teasing, and you still learn something. Great.

I wanted so much to like this movie but I can't say that I did.

Terry Pratchett's book is wonderful and the film follows the plot pretty much exactly and for that it gets four stars. The characters are drawn reasonably and are not jarringly different from how I would imagine them.

That's what's good about it but everything else was disappointing.

First of all; a great deal of TP's humor lies in imaginative similes that do not translate visually at all. "Lighting stabbed at the mountains like an inefficient assassin" how do you visualize that in a cartoon? It just becomes lightning. In the books the weather is cast as if it were a character but it has no lines so the film ignores that running gag and the Shakespearean parody aspect of that completely.

Perhaps more important than that, though, is the cartoon style. My problems with that are difficult to describe but try to imagine the difference between Scooby Doo and The Simpsons. The Simpsons doesn't try nearly so hard to be drawn in any detail however the faces, stances, and expressions are carefully drawn to help convey the emotions of the characters, with excellent comic timing for adults. That's what is missing. This film has no comic timing whatsoever. None. Expressions of surprise, for what they are worth, appear on characters faces a full second after the surprise has passed and dissipated. Other expressions likewise don't convey any useful information or emotional content. Like a Scooby Doo cartoon.

Voice acting likewise appears uncoordinated. Although the voices individually aren't bad (except for the actors - especially Tomjohn and Vitollier who sound embarrassed to be on stage) - in concert they do not sound at all natural. Real conversations overlap. This sounds like everyone is reading a line and then pointing to the next person instead of acting out an entire conversation. Example in point when Magrat and Granny are arguing and Nanny is "coo cooing" the baby... The baby talk is a separate line, spoken in isolation, while the arguers wait for it to be spoken. That's not how people argue. That's just bad acting. Very, very, bad acting.

The opening dialog of the book, "When shall we three meet again", "Well I can do next Tuesday" is a good joke when handled well which the film spoils by putting another scene in between the lines.

I'm sorry, but this just is not good.