MRS BROWN’s BOYS D’MOVIE
Cert 15.
94 mins.
Comedy/Romance/Musical.
Starring Brendan O’Carroll, Jennifer Gibney, Eilish O’Carroll, Pat Shields, Rory Cowan, Paddy Houlihan, Danny O’Carroll, Robert Bathurst
Feisty Dublin matriarch Agnes Brown (Brendan O’Carroll) proudly runs a fruit and vegetable stall in Moore Street Market, which has been passed down through the generations.
The foul-mouthed harridan hopes daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney) will take up the mantle but a dastardly developer, PR Irwin (Dermot Crowley), intervenes with plans to bulldoze the site.
Aided by Cathy, her sons Mark (Pat Shields), Rory (Rory Cowan) and Dermot (Paddy Houlihan), and next-door neighbour Winnie (Eilish O’Carroll), Agnes resolves to take on the Irish establishment and give it a good spanking.
Dermot’s best friend Buster Brady (Danny O’Carroll), bumbling lawyer Tom Crews (Simon Delaney) and a well-to-do barrister called Maydo Archer (Robert Bathurst), who is prone to stress-related Tourette’s syndrome, pledge their support to Agnes’ seemingly hopeless cause.
Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie is a half-baked expansion of the hugely popular BBC sitcom.
Crude punchlines are depressingly predictable and the absence of a laughter track from a live studio audience exposes the script’s dearth of gags and imagination.
O’Carroll evidently subscribes to the mantra: if it isn’t funny on the page, add some profanities.
The slurry of gratuitous expletives and a repeated use of cuss words for laughs are wearying.
Aside from the large-scale musical numbers that bookmark the haphazard narrative and a pointlessly protracted chase sequence, the film has no obvious cinematic ambitions above the usual sitcom format.
A hare-brained subplot involving Mr Wang (Brendan O’Carroll again), Chinese owner of a school devoted to training blind ninjas, embraces hideous stereotypes that the malformed character might himself describe as “a rittle bit lacist”.
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