Monty Python are back, and this time they have brought along Simon Pegg to star in their first feature film in over 30 years. Not only that but they even have the late great Robin Williams voicing a dog. That should be a three hit combination and after seeing it I can confidently say, that you should see ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING else!
Absolutely Anything features a bunch of poorly CGI’d aliens, voiced by the cast of Monty Python, that decide the best way to choose the fate of the planet Earth is to bestow absolute power to one human, if that human uses the power for good, the Earth survives, if not, well... you know. If the plot sounds familiar it’s probably because it’s been used constantly from Bruce Almighty to episodes of The Simpsons and so on and so forth.
So look, this is supposed to be a comedy: it has Simon Pegg, it involves the creative team from Monty Python, it should be a home-run, but it’s not. It’s an unfunny mess of a film with so many awkward and uneven jokes with no real story. The film sets up a basic story with basic jokes, the biggest problem is that the story is too basic and the jokes don’t land mostly because they don’t know what kind of comedy they want to be: the jokes are either family-friendly but then switch to expletives that don’t really fit with the rest of the jokes. The only real saving-grace of this disappointing movie is that it mercifully only lasts 81 minutes.
Monty Python has always been an acquired taste when it comes to comedy; I’m a huge fan but I understand if people find the comedy too random and too left-field to always comprehend. It just seems in this film though that they have played it far too safe to the point where it really is unrecognisable as a Python endeavour. Gone is the iconic visual animation we’ve seen from The Flying Circus in favour of really poor CGI and the humour lacks any of the clever overtones, play on words or silly walks that make it recognisable to fans of the ensemble.
You know, I really feel for Simon Pegg because I’ve been really hammering a lot of his films lately. I thought Man Up and Kill Me Three Times are horrendous pieces of sh*t and Absolutely Anything slides perfectly into the middle of this sh*t sandwich. He’s a great comedic actor and I am forever in his debt for his work on the TV series Spaced not to mention Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. Outside of that though, he seems to only work well when he’s likable side-kick in blockbuster franchises such as Mission Impossible and the revamped Star Trek. Put him in as the leading man for anything else and it just seems to be a waste of his talent. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a great guy, he just really needs to make better film choices.
At the end of the day, this could have been so much better and really should have been so much better. This is one of Robin Williams’ last roles and unfortunately it is not one that he will be remembered for. The script for this film sat on the shelf for years, how it ever got off the shelf is a mystery, but as I said at the beginning: do yourself a favour and watch Absolutely Anything else.
Absolutely Anything gets Half a Star (that’s Half a Star for that one time that I laughed while watching this movie - although that might have been gas)
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