JONNY LEE MILLER IN LOVE HONOUR AND OBEY

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LOVE, HONOUR AND OBEY LINKS

TFI Friday transcript (virtually the entire cast appeared!!!)
Love, honour & obey official site

LOVE, HONOUR AND OBEY REVIEWS

Love, Honour & Obey (18)

Anciano and Burdis are back with another improv film ... but Love, Honour and Obey is much lighter and sillier than their previous big screen outing, the black comedy Final Cut. They've also added to their starry stable of actors; the cast here is a virtual who's who of top young British talent, all enjoying themselves as they improvise their characters and dialog based on a rough script outline.

Zany crime comedy is the genre this time, as Jonny (Miller) asks his childhood friend (Law) for an introduction to the North London mob boss (Winstone), who is nervously preparing for his wedding to a sexy soap star (Frost). Jonny soon ingratiates himself into the "family" as a loyal new employee, but no one's aware that he's stirring a gang war with the South London boss (Pertwee), whose right-hand man (Ifans) is drawn into an increasingly violent grudge match with Jonny. And Jonny doesn't seem aware of the trouble he's in as things escalate to all-out war.

This is all played with an off-handed humour that keeps us giggling from start to finish, even with some truly horrific violence. The energy level is high; it's consistently entertaining, cleverly assembled and nicely punctuated with karaoke sequences in which the actors belt out classic tunes (tweaked by a studio producer, obviously). In another running gag, Dominic and Burdis have a hilarious ongoing dialog about Burdis' impotency; Burke plays his wife with her trademark sharp-edged comic timing. The terrific cast effortlessly mix the comedy and drama (although Law wobbles with a surprisingly weak character). But in the end, the violence and mayhem give the comedy an uneasy tone--people dying senselessly and violently isn't a laughing matter, especially when they're endearing comic characters to begin with.

Love, Honour & Obey

by Alexander Walker

Gerald Kaufman said yesterday in this paper, commenting on Greg Dyke's new BBC mission statement, that he felt uncomfortable with the Corporation's plans to back big-budget cinema movies. He is right. The stupidity of the ages will be reproduced if licence money is diverted into this kind of high-risk gamble, which boosts only egos, not revenues. 

Let Mr Dyke remember that four of the most profitable cinema films in recent years: Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty, Trainspotting and Shallow Grave were all made with a total budget of only £10 million. Elephantiasis of the creative ego has been responsible for more financial debacles in the industry than any other factor in the past 50 years of British film making.  If Mr Dyke wants to see how his Corporation's licence fees should not be invested, let him look - if he can bear it - at the disreputable new BBC Films release of this week, Love, Honour and Obey, another romper room assembly of second and third-magnitude British talents, much the same ones who made the dreadful Final Cut last year, including Ray Winstone (who must now hold the all time record for starring in the worst bunch ever of British made movies), Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Kathy Burke, Jonny Lee Miller, and Rhys Ifans. Let the dishonour roll end there, for mercy's sake.  

All of them do their big number in stereophonic obscenity, playing East End gangster scum - the sort that the lower ranks of the film industry and show business support at funerals and weddings of the London underworld - engaged in a north-south mobster war. The film is a scandalous deployment of public revenues. It is violent, pornographic, incoherent and sickeningly narcissistic. Even if it finds its level among enough of the lowest dregs of filmgoers to make it profitable, it is not how the once great BBC should be recycling the revenues it extracts by ever increasing taxes on the ever diminishing numbers of those who view its TV channels, or not.  

The only thing to be thankful for is that this time the Corporation's folly is not compounded by the incompetence of the Arts Council in awarding it a penny from the National Lottery. You, the viewers and listeners, alone made this excrement possible.

Taken from THIS IS LONDON

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