Dir: Andrew O'Connor
With: David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Peter Capaldi
Star rating: **
When British television comedians make the move into film it's generally not a pretty sight. Some of us are still unable to recall Cannon and Ball's The Boys in Blue without adopting the shudder and 1000-yard stare of a Vietnam vet. You had to be there, man, it was brutal.
Only one act has shifted successfully from small to big screen: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Anyone who saw the endlessly inventive Spaced knew they'd be able to cut it, and so it proved in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. David Mitchell and Robert Webb of Channel 4's Peep Show are hoping for a similar outcome here. While it's a nice try, they're not ready for big school yet.
M&W play the two halves of a magic act who go their separate ways after one sleeps with the other's wife and she loses her head in a guillotine accident. The two are reunited - that's the magicians, not the wife and her head - at a tournament in Jersey and the feud erupts again.
This is a debut feature by O'Connor, and he's gone with the maxim of stick with what and who you know. To break it down: O'Connor is a producer on Peep Show. The screenplay is by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who write Peep Show and The Thick of It. Peter Capaldi, the best thing in The Thick of It, pulls off the same trick in Magicians. Mitchell and Webb, meanwhile, are exactly the same as they are in Peep Show: the dark one nerdy and whiny, the blond laid back and vaguely sleazy.
Though Peep Show fans will be at home here, even they will be checking their watches during the very long periods between decent jokes. Besides Jessica Stevenson's awesome impersonation of Jessica Rabbit there's barely anything going on visually, and the entire enterprise feels like an hour of OK telly trying to pass as a film.
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