Fackham Hall - Movie Review - Fremantle Shipping News

All up, Fackham Hall is not particularly clever, not particularly funny, and not particularly worth seeing.

I suspect I’m showing my age. Probably too that my sense of humour comes from another time when Monty Python made my sides split. And perhaps I’ve never been quite taken with the Jimmy Carr approach to comedy.

You enter the cinema knowing this movie is a spoof on the period drama Downton Abbey and the whole British class system, and you’ve already worked out on your own how you are intended properly to utter the title words, ‘Fackham Hall’, but what you aren’t ready for, at least I wasn’t, is the gag-a-second blitz that endures for the entire film. At first, as the plot develops, some make you laugh, but then the humour descends into simple schoolboy humour that I suspect schoolboys of my era would have blushed at, not because they thought they should be embarrassed by it, but because it wasn’t really funny. If the Year 12s put this on as the 2026 school play, believing it would dazzle all and sundry with its cleverness and wit, one suspects the drama teacher would quickly advise they had seriously underestimated their audience and the play was neither clever nor funny and really rather silly, demeaning and needing much more work before seeing the light of day or the darkness of night.

When I looked later at what a range of reviewers had said about the movie, in case I’d missed something significant, I was a little surprised some gave it a sort of ok rating. The Guardian’s Adrian Morton, for example, gave it 3/5 stars. My inclination is 1/5 or 1.5/5 at best, and I would advise my friends not to worry. Perhaps it’s a movie just for Jimmy Carr fans. A few of the audience in the preview screening I sat through were laughing boisterously, but only a few. A couple walked out a third of the way through.

Actually, I think the US Roger Ebert review by Neil Minow got it dead right –

‘This is one of those “throw everything at the screen and by the time you realize that one wasn’t funny, four more will have come at you” movies. These include running jokes, anachronisms, sight gags, potty humor (in one case, chamber pot-y humor), slapstick, an extended dick joke, an extended “who’s on first”-type joke involving a character named Watt, sight gags, and verbal misunderstandings, e.g., “You fought [in WWI] with my father.” “No, we were on the same side.” And a tailor shop called “Tailor Swift.”

‘One element of this film that works well is that the actors understand the assignment, no winking at the audience, except for British comedian/presenter and co-writer of the screenplay, Jimmy Carr, playing a vicar who cannot help running the liturgy texts together to make them sound dirty. The score by Oli Julian and the costumes by Rosalind Ebbutt are also perfectly suitable for the kinds of movies this one spoofs. It’s just the jokes that, like British cocktails, are to American taste lukewarm.’

For me, only the last sentence needs adjustment to read – It’s just the jokes that, like British cocktails, are to Australian taste lukewarm.

All up, Fackham Hall is not particularly clever, not particularly funny, and not particularly worth seeing.

But perhaps, as I say, I’m just showing my age and that my sense of humour comes from another time.

1.5/5 Stars.

Season starts February 19 at Windsor.

By Michael Barker, Editor, Fremantle Shipping News

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