Film reviews: College Road Trip, Get Smart, Somers Town

Published on Friday 15 August 2008 17:22

College Road Trip ** Get Smart * Somers Town ***

COLLEGE ROAD TRIP

Martin Lawrence plays an overprotective father abusing the perks of being a police chief to keep tabs on his high-achieving teenage daughter (Raven-Symon, who passed college age five years ago) when she wants to look around the country to choose her future university.

Dad insists on driving her to Washington in his police car and naturally the trip takes an unexpected route, with many life lessons and trust-your-child sentiments learned along the way.

"I was afraid if I let you go, you'd never need your daddy again," says Lawrence, who has already been shown poring over family videos at such unhealthy length he could be a character in a David Lynch movie. You can understand why his daughter wants to attend university several states away.

In a picture where a pig plays chess, it must be approaching the End of Days when a film's funniest moments belong to Donny Osmond, above. As a show tune-singing dad of nitro-powered perkiness, the spoofing of his processed-cheese personality is a rare bright spot. Otherwise, this road trip takes a heavy toll.

GET SMART (12A)

In another pointless remake of an old television series, Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart, who longs to be a field agent like his hero, Agent 23 (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson). His boss, Chief (Alan Arkin), is reluctant to lose Max's clerical skills until the evil KAOS organisation kills off practically all his other agents. Max gets his chance, paired with the more experienced Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway, right), to infiltrate KAOS and stop its nuclear ambitions in Russia.

Get Smart is the sort of movie that gets described as "fun for the whole family", but it really isn't. It will be no fun at all for members of the family over 10. Or sophisticated ones over eight. And yet, isn't the core audience likely to be a mature one, as fans of the original TV series?

Big, loud and obvious, the remake has some elements of the old show, including the catchphrases, but none of the series' appealing daftness. Instead of a bumbling oaf, Maxwell Smart is now moderately capable, and where's the comedy in that? Throw in a series of interminable, convoluted action pieces that don't seem to know when to stop, and you may feel in need of an agent's revolver yourself.

SOMERS TOWN (12A)

In what is more a vignette than a feature film, Shane Meadows sketches a scrappy but engaging story about the cross-cultural friendship between two incomers to Somers Town, a grotty urban area at the back of St Pancras. After being mugged and beaten up by local kids, Midlands runaway Tommo (This Is England's Thomas Turgoose) pals up with shy Polish teenager Marek (Piotr Jagiello). Together they find work helping out the local Del Boy (Perry Benson, a vision first thing in the morning when fishing out change from his thong), and share a crush on an older French waitress. Shot in monochrome, it's a work in miniature, but Meadows creates a persuasive mix of whimsy, kind-heartedness and young men just being themselves.

All on general release from Friday