Spoilers ahead.
A few years ago, comedian Jack Whitehall had an idea for a sitcom about a schoolteacher who was "a bigger kid than those he teachers" (IMDB). Before sitting down to write it, he had a bowel movement and suffered a horrendous case of diarrhea. Before flushing the lavatory, he gazed into the shit-spattered abyss and found that despite all the undeniable crap, there were still traces of sweetcorn and he had what passed for an idea. Why work hard when you can sketch out whatever and include the odd, passable gag when you happened to think of one by accident? Rather than write it, he would simply use his toilet paper to gather some samples. Due to the physical impracticality of using a stapler to join the corner of each sheet, he had to resort to a few wanking sessions in order to provide the glue. When the manuscript was dry, he slipped it into a manuscript and posted it to E4, the channel that broadcast The Inbetweeners (2008-2010), a sitcom that proved popular with young people. E4 decided that this submission - entitled Bad Education - was beneath them and the reader chucked it down the rubbish chute and it found itself drifting down a sewer. Sometime later it passed a door built into the tiled walls of the dank underbelly. The door was marked BBC3 (a channel which, yes gave us Doctor Who Confidential, Torchwood and reruns of Family Guy, but also puked up the satanic Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents). A security camera fitted to the ceiling spied the debris and the door opened. Someone emerged from the darkness within and grabbed it before it could sail on forever. BBC3 loved it and the series grew up to become - according to Cineworld's synopsis - "one of the BBC's most cherished sitcoms".
Apparently the series proved popular enough to garner a feature-length motion picture spin-off (Helloooo No. 8 in the UK Box Office Top 10). Well some of it would be passingly amusing and not intolerable company, even if might never be laugh-out-loud funny (something which Mrs. Brown's Boys could achieve at least once) so perhaps the same could have been said of the film. And could it?
The film opens in Amsterdam with some Hasidic Jews visiting the Anne Frank house. The camera dollies past a queue of these quiet visitors until we come to the back where some British pupils are being disruptive. Yes, the ever so unloveable Alfie Whickers (Whitehall) - who is also inexplicably romantically linked to the pretty-but-dull (Sarah Solemani) - has taken his charges on a field trip to the house where a young girl was hiding from the Nazis with her family. Whickers decides to jump queue by pretending that the disabilities of a chair-bound student aren't restricted to his leg. Afterwards, he is drugged as a prank and hallucinates his Chinese pupil as a panda. He then mistakes an Anne Frank dummy for the real deal and abducts it, escaping on a bicycle. During this, the dummy is wrapped in a white towel while Alfie is dressed in a red hoody. Yeah, you can tell where its going before John Williams is invoked.
A year later, Whickers takes the class on another trip, this time to Cornwall. This time, they are joined by the overprotective Trunchball-like mother of one of his students. She dons a pair of what are essentially Google glasses so she can record everything that goes on (the one gag which passes for a joke is where a student tells it to search for "Two Girls, One Cup"). The class stay in the "Baits Hotel" and witness a Summer Solstice procession straight out of The Wicker Man (1973) (the filmmakers even go to the trouble of recreating a shot of two masked participants poking their heads out of a window). Are the majority of the target audience really likely to get these references? They might get the later references to Braveheart ("They can take our lives but they'll never take our..." "Pasties!") and 300 ("This. Is. Cornwall!") when a parodic battle is about to take place (Zack Snyder's use of slow motion is also given a nod). Someone makes a jokey comparison between the procession and pantomime - presumably Whitehall thinks nothing of pantomime when tucking into his Christmas dinner or chocolate Easter egg.
In a pub, they fall in with members of the Cornwall Liberation Army and they mistake Whickers for a member after seeing his amateur tattoo "CLA...", which was meant to read "CLASS K FOREVER" before he fainted. So at least, Whitehall understands the concept of "set-up" and "pay-off". One of the members persuades Whickers to smuggle in what he thinks are drugs into a party for toffs (where Alfie is dared into "teabagging a swan" - the least funny gag involving a large bird this year since Kevin James fought a peacock in Paul Blart Mall Cop 2) but it turns out to be a bomb. It takes some gall to depict toffs as victims of extremists whilst the country is under Tory occupation but this set piece is bookended by passing seemingly liberal quotes as "...the rich get richer..." (just like Whitehall will from the profits made from this abortion) and "Austerity is bullshit". Alfie is later mistaken for a leader of the group and this is captured on the News (which brings to mind the infinitely superior Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa).
There is no excuse in all of conceivable reality for how this film exists in the state that it does. With no laughs and no Michelle Gomez, The Bad Education Movie is not just a bad film, it is a call-to-arms. Critics and reviewers should feel compelled to implore their audience no to spend one penny on this furball of British "comedy" (this is the same country that gave us The Ladykillers and Monty Python). If anyone was curious about wanting to watch this in good conscience, the most ethical solution might be to find a cinema where a season pass is available. Then it might motivate aspiring filmmakers to get their hands on what they can find and afford to produce something worthy of the faintest praise, free and independent of the industry responsible for this film's existence. How dare this get past the script read-through without someone with a tenth of a brain cell raising an objection? How dare the actors say yes to the project in exchange for more money)? How dare there be more carbon emissions from the vehicular transport of actors and equipment to the various locations? Really, Britain? This is what it has come to?
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