Oh no! He didn’t?
There is a specific kind of despair reserved for the sight of a Hollywood heavyweight feigning confusion at a digestive biscuit; a genre unto itself: the transatlantic fish-out-of-water comedy, where an American star descends upon a quaint British village to learn humility, fall in love, and inevitably save a local institution. In many ways it’s just a variant of the tried-and-tested-and-flogged-to-death Hallmark template of a big city girl returning to a small town to discover the true meaning of Trad Wife supplication. Tinsel Town, a Sky Original production that feels less like a film and more like a Producers-style tax write-off, attempts to follow this flaccid formula in merry measure but the result is about as appealing as a brussels sprout wrapped in a Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
Kiefer Sutherland – stars as? brings to life? appears as? – is visible on screen as Bradley Mack, a washed-up action hero whose career has declined to the point where his agent, played by Katherine Ryan, exiles him to a Yorkshire pantomime. At the heart of Tinsel Town is the potential for a rich vein of satire – Extras did it beautifully years ago – but it’s too afraid of causing any of its likely-to-be-sleeping-off-a-big-Christmas-lunch audience indigestion to offer any actual bite and instead of a sharp deconstruction of celebrity ego, or an exploration of the peculiar madness of British panto, we get a toothless romp that mistakes noise for energy and sequentiality for structure.
Sutherland, an actor capable of immense gravity, spends the runtime looking as if he is scanning the middle distance for an exit sign, playing Mack not as a monstrous diva, which might have been fun, but as a bewildered grump who seems genuinely confused by the concept of acting on a stage. It’s a bizarre creative choice that immediately drains the narrative of the necessary friction between Hollywood slickness and amateur dramatics. Watching Jack Bauer struggle to come to cognitive terms with Jason Manford in a gaudy frock and fright wig should be inherently funny; but here, it is merely uncomfortable, like watching a drunken relative try to rap at a wedding.
Opposite him is Rebel Wilson as Jill, the no-nonsense choreographer of the pantomime who, in some Ursula/Ariel style pact seems to have stolen Jodie Whittaker’s voice, mangling the accent a little in the process. Wilson seems ill at ease, her usual wildly improvisational style completely at odds with the lacklustre energy of everyone and everything else around her. It robs her of comedic autonomy and leaves her adrift in an ill-defined and poorly articulated soap-opera B-plot concerning her ex-husband, Danny Dyer barely raising an eyebrow’s worth of effort to deliver his usual warmed-over geezer gruffness. The chemistry between her and Sutherland is non-existent, creating a void where romantic tension goes to die, and the audience envies its fate. When the script demands, they bond over unearned moments of vulnerability or insight, but the gear shift is so jarring it nearly induces whiplash.
Director Chris Foggin assembles a cast that’s a veritable who’s who of what are they doing in this?, suggesting a chaotic raffle draw at a talent agency, yet neither he nor the script seemingly has any idea what to do with them. The screenplay, credited to Piers Ashworth and Adam Brown, operates on the assumption that simply placing Danny Dyer and Derek Jacobi in the same postcode constitutes a joke. It does not. What does constitute a joke – or at least a cruel prank – is a moment in the middle of the film where Jacobi’s character soliloquises on the nobility of Pantomime. It’s a moment of brilliance, an emotional, nuanced piece of acting that only serves to expose everything else, before or that follows, as the shambolic, sub-standard, shameful waste of time and talent.
Structurally, the film is a mess. It lurches from scene to scene with no sense of rhythm, often cutting away from jokes before they land or lingering on reaction shots that reveal nothing but the actors’ own bewilderment. The panto production itself – a chaotic staging of Cinderella – is depicted with such inaccuracy that one wonders if the writers have ever actually stepped inside a provincial theatre. Panto is anarchist, rude, and vibrant; the version in Tinsel Town is sanitised, glossy, and relentlessly safe. It lacks the very anarchic spirit it claims to celebrate and while central to the supposed plot, the panto itself ends up very much as an afterthought.
Tinsel Town is a product of pure calculation, a festive content block designed to fill a slot on a schedule rather than tell a story that needed to be told. It squanders a decent cast on a script that feels like a first draft and direction that lacks any distinct point of view. It is a film that demands nothing of its audience but their subscription fee, offering in return a hollow, plastic bauble of a movie.
