Churchill: The Hollywood Years review

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Back in the '80s, Channel Four's Comic Strip Presents series pilloried the great and good by imagining them played by Hollywood megastars: Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill or Charles Bronson as Ken Livingstone. Now Strip svengali Peter Richardson's at it again, retooling Winston Churchill in the buffed-up, gun-toting, cigar-chomping form of Christian Slater. Laugh? You'll never start.

Surrounding his slumming star with a rogue's gallery of gurning British comics (Vic'n'Bob, Harry Enfield, The Office's Mackenzie Crook), Richardson shoots for Carry On-style anarchy but misses by a country mile. Neve Campbell enters into the spirit of the enterprise as a young Queen Elizabeth, but the rest of the cast just look embarrassed by the blitz imploding around them.

What plot there is revolves around a dumb conspiracy to install Hitler (Antony Sher) as King. Like everything else though, it's too amateurish to raise even so much as a titter.

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