The Bad Education Movie

The Bad Education Movie (15)

UK 2015 91 mins Dir: Elliot Hegarty Cast: Jack Whitehall, Iain Glen, Joanna Scanlan, Harry Enfield, Matthew Horne, Sarah Solemani, Jeremy Irvine

The film equivalent of one of those grubby end-of-year school polo shirts that’s daubed with swear words, penises and insults, The Bad Education Movie manages the none-too-impressive feat of taking a reasonably funny BBC3 TV series and utterly torpedoing its big screen potential. Throughout, there’s a manic look on the faces of the actors – nowhere more apparent than on star Jack Whitehall’s – that suggests: how does this cinema business work?

Well, certainly not like this.  Whatever flaws the series may have possessed are now horribly magnified by the enlarged proximity of a cinema screen, something that throws the film’s obvious lack of budget, visual ugliness and dearth of jokes into sharp relief. Perhaps there’s something to be said for certain properties remaining on the TV.

Still, it worked for both Inbetweeners movies, so why not this? However, the key with those is they stayed reasonably true to the crude formula of their TV inspiration, even when taking the characters to Shagaluf and Australia. Bad Education, by contrast, moves away from the very area where the series drew its sole source of satirical power – the bog standard inner-city comprehensive – with the end result flailing in increasingly desperate anatomical jokes.

The story, what there is of it, sees Whitehall’s hapless, infantile teacher Alfie Wickers taking his ragtag class on a post-exam trip to Cornwall (racism; clotted cream; pasties) after his Las Vegas plans are vetoed by the PTA, and with the horror of a disastrous visit to Anne Frank’s house the previous year still fresh in the memory. The increasingly joyless holiday cliché that is disturbingly prevalent in British sitcom spin-offs takes in a visit to the Eden Project (which involves Whitehall’s testicles), sexual depravity involving a swan (which involves Whitehall’s testicles) and, ultimately, a pound shop Game of Thrones-style pitched battle between the Cornish Liberation Army and the police (which, you guessed it, involves Whitehall’s testicles, this time as lets it all hang from the bottom of a helicopter).

What makes the film especially dispiriting is the presence of a great cast, all of whom are dragged down the proverbial tin mine with the whole enterprise. Joanna Scanlan as prissy PTA member Susan, Alfie’s nemesis who insists on accompanying him on the trip with a pair of special recordable glasses, suffers through indignities unbecoming of an actress who was so tremendous in The Thick of It. Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen meanwhile as Liberation Army member Pasco rolls his r’s whilst looking like he’d rather be somewhere else and The Railway Man’s Jeremy Irvine is stranded playing one of Alfie’s former class mates Atticus, an antagonistic posh sort who is infinitely forgettable. When Clarke Peters from The Wire inexplicably turns up as an Interpol officer, one has to wonder at the extent of his involvement: did he have a holiday home close to the filming location?

Frankly, if the Cornish want further ammunition in their move towards independence, they need look no further than this dismal excuse for a comedy.