Film review: ‘THE CRITIC’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’
There’s something weirdly meta and unsettling about sitting in a room as a film critic watching a movie about a fiendishly pompous and self-centred critic, in this case a theatre scribe. In Anand Tucker’s The Critic, Sir Ian McKellen’s gleefully malevolent performance as London theatre critic James Erskine is the highlight of an uneven film.
With his notorious poison pen, Erskine is the scourge of anyone who has the temerity to tread the boards before him. His outrageously verbose and acerbic tirades in the newspaper, The Chronicle, are responsible for bringing in many of the paper’s readers, however, making him untouchable … or so he thinks. The paper’s new proprietor, the straight-laced Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong) dislikes Erskine’s wrecking ball approach to theatre criticism and attempts to rein him in, leading the incensed critic on a dangerous quest for revenge. Drawn into his web is the victim of many of his most brutal critiques, the actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton).
McKellen delights in Erskine’s vindictiveness, self-importance and Machiavellian scheming. The script by Patrick Marber affords him some amusingly snarky one liners, at one point he describes Nina’s performance in a play as resembling ‘a deflating dirigible’. McKellen’s terrific performance is a conspicuous standout here. Without wishing to sound like Erskine, Gemma Arterton’s feels a little off-key. This is in part due to the dialogue she has been given as she seems oddly stiff and when talking about her situation and her feelings, sounds if she’s reciting a third person description of her character. Mark Strong is appropriately dignified as the Viscount Brooke but the character is one dimensional. Alfred Enoch (aka Harry Potter’s Dean Thomas) is an amiable presence as Erskine’s loyal secretary and lover Tom but the character is limited and ends up a little bland.
When McKellen’s not on screen plotting and sniping at people and the film is veers away from Erskine’s eloquently venomous outbursts, it feels much less assured. Some subplots here involving love triangles and even murder resemble something from low budget British crime tv. Also, an attempt to explore the homophobia Erskine experiences as gay man at a time when homosexuality was designated a crime, could have been a much more interesting backdrop but isn’t sufficiently developed.
Set in 1934, the film also doesn’t capture the period particularly well and has a strangely and disappointingly artificial look.
The Critic is worth seeing for McKellen’s spirited performance but he’s forced to do too much of the heavy lifting here and the other parts of the film tend to sag.
Nick’s rating: **1/2
Genre: Drama/ Historical.
Classification: M.
Director(s): Anand Tucker.
Release date: 3rd Oct 2024.
Running time: 95 mins.
Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.