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RICKY Gervais is no mug. He held a Scottish preview for his new film, David Brent: Life on the Road, during the Edinburgh festival, ensuring a sold out house (full-price tickets £18 a pop, which included a Q&A later with the man himself). At the event, one could buy a Life on the Road songbook, £10, and there are plans for an album too. One of the few things not on sale on Tuesday, indeed, were mugs.
Never fear – tickets will return to normal prices when the film opens in cinemas tomorrow. Just as well, given its distinctly ordinary quality. After more than a decade since the series ended, David Brent is back in the building, and showing his age.
He is not back in the same Wernham Hogg office in Slough, though. Life has moved on for the one-time manager of a stationery suppliers. Well, sort of. He is still in the selling game, but now he is punting toilet products (cue tampon gags) and he is just one of the troops on the sales floor, not the manager.
But he still has Fame-sized dreams of making it big in the music business with his new band, Foregone Conclusion. To that end, he has cashed in a few pensions, booked time off, and is going to take his band on tour. Of course, there is a documentary crew there to film it all, just as they did in The Office.
In this way Gervais, here writing, starring and directing, sets out his stall for what one might think will be 96 minutes of on the road capers and laughs. While not expecting This is Spinal Tap - nothing ever could ever match that - one did not bank on it being This is Taking Forever, or This is So Heavy Handed on the Pathos Front I Could Scream.
The pathos problem shows itself early on. Brent is still the same squirm-inducing office japester, and Gervais gives him a few cracking lines to get the party started, but it soon becomes evident that the times have changed and left him even further behind, and not in a good way. One character, in summing up his situation, also puts her finger on what is wrong with the film. Speaking to the human resources manager about Brent, his colleague says she fears it is not good for him to be followed around by cameras again. Before, he was the boss, and the people he worked with were nice (lovely Dawn and Tim, his loyal sidekick Gareth). Now his colleagues largely despise him, and don’t hold back on showing their contempt. Instead of laughing at or with him, they are sneering, as are the session musicians he is paying to be in his band.
As a situation for a comedy it is more depressing than funny. Nor is Gervais content with a smattering of pathos. Filling in what has been happening with Brent in the years since we last saw him, he lays it on with a shovel.
Pathetic, delusional characters can be amusing. Take Alan Partridge. It is easy to laugh at him because one knows, the way Steve Coogan plays him, that he is essentially a git. He deserves humiliation. Gervais made Brent likeable, though, loveable even. We don’t want to see him suffer, or not for too long anyway, and not for 96 minutes. That would be, that is, dispiriting.
There are some bright spots. Gervais (Extras, Cemetery Junction) knows talent when he sees it, and wisely gives a decent slice of screen time to Doc Brown (aka Ben Bailey Smith) who plays Brent’s long-suffering sidekick, Dom. He also finds room for Jo Hartley as the colleague concerned about Brent.
Otherwise, you will see the set-piece gags coming a mile off and the ace lines are too few and far between. This would have been far better as a one-off television special, a short, sweet reunion with one of Gervais’s finest creations. Life on the Road, alas, is a slog too far down memory lane.
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