6/10
"I Wish I Was American"
7 December 2004
A patchy British send-up of the way Hollywood rewrites history in favour of America.

Although I enjoyed seeing a British film sticking two fingers up to Hollywood, in the end it only, and ironically, serves to demonstrate why Hollywood has won the war in the UK box office. A ramshackle gathering of comical ideas, just about held together around the idea that Churchill wasn't a fat old British aristocrat, but was in fact a young American hero who single-handedly saves England from the Nazis, while falling in love with the future Queen of England.

But too many times the script fell foul of going for the obvious gag, or just swearing for supposed comical effect. And the action sequences were so incompetently done, looking more like something out of an episode of Dad's Army, that they didn't work as a send up of Hollywood action sequences.

Whereas Monty Python had the talents of Terry Gilliam to give their movies style, Peter Richardson is somewhat less than gifted in that department. Some of it looks good, some of it just looks cheap.

Reeves and Mortimer are tedious as usual, and you just get the feeling that most of the Brit comedians who appeared were just here to amuse themselves. This gives a pretty amateurish feel to some scenes.

Still, I laughed and I think its worth seeing, simply because it does show up the absurdity of Hollywood history.
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