O Lucky Man! (UK, 1973)
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Graham Crowden

After If.... won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1969, Malcolm McDowell was desperate to work with Lindsay Anderson again. Teaming up with If.... screenwriter David Sherwin, McDowell spent the years in and around A Clockwork Orange churning out draft after draft of a screenplay based loosely on his life. Anderson wanted a film of epic proportions, and what he delivered is at once epic, joyous, frustrating and utterly perplexing.O Lucky Man! is the second instalment of Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy, following If.... and preceding Britannia Hospital. It is not so much a sequel as a companion piece to If...., with this Mick Travis being an everyman figure rather than just the grown-up version of the revolutionary schoolboy. Many of the cast of If.... return playing multiple, completely different roles, and aside from Travis there is little or no attempt made at direct continuity.Where If.... was based on Anderson's experiences at public school, O Lucky Man! is loosely based on the life of Malcolm McDowell, who started out as a coffee salesman before wandering into acting and being cast in If.... almost by accident. The story of Mick Travis has been likened to Candide, Voltaire's sprawling 18th-century epic about an everyman indoctrinated with optimism, who journeys out into the world on a series of exciting and terrifying adventures.As with Candide, O Lucky Man! has a picaresque structure, with an episodic, incredibly rambling storyline which is very difficult to summarise in a paragraph. It begins with Travis working for Imperial Coffee as a salesman and being put in charge of the North-East of England. Following his apparent success he is given Scotland as well, but ends up being interrogated by the military who believe he is a Russian agent. He manages to escape their torture after the base is attacked and evacuated.With no money to speak of, Travis volunteers for a series of experiments led by Dr. Millar (Graham Crowden), who talks about using science to unlock the full potential of mankind. Upon his discovery of a patient who is half-man, half-sheep, Travis flees in fright, hitching a lift to London with Alan Price's band and falling in love with their groupie (Helen Mirren). Having wangled his way into meeting her father, the richest man in the world (Ralph Richardson), Travis becomes his personal assistant, only to be dragged into shady government dealings and imprisoned for fraud. Upon release he is robbed and beaten up by the homeless, leading him to wander into an audition with a film director, played self-referentially by Lindsay Anderson.At this point you would normally have every reason to berate me for giving away the whole plot of the film. But the fact is that O Lucky Man! is very difficult to follow unless you have some prior idea of where it is going. At a slow-moving 183 minutes, it requires a massive amount of patience both to sit through and to tolerate the contrivances and oddities of its plot. There is still substance to be found, but many of its interesting ideas are severely compromised by their execution.As with Candide, O Lucky Man! is at heart a social satire wrapped up in romantic and adventure elements. Like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire was looking to create a work which could satirise society by means of elaborate, whimsical allegory - so elaborate and whimsical that it would slip through the net of church wrath or state censorship. Anderson attempts the same here with less immediate success, although his intentions are noble and his film has dated somewhat better than other contemporary satires, if only because its scope and themes are so universal.O Lucky Man! is a satire of commercialism and ambition in a capitalist society. Travis begins the film guided by optimism, ambition and his willingness to do anything to get rich. Even before his success with Imperial Coffee, he seems to have totally abandoned his revolutionary principles, acknowledging either through maturity or base self-interest that the only way to make it in life is to fake it. Anderson's re-tuning of the character reflects both the selling-out of many of his left-wing comrades and Britain as a whole, which was slowly eroding or reversing its post-war achievements (something he would return to in Britannia Hospital).The film is also about luck, with most of Travis' adventures coming about mostly from being in the right place at the right time. His success in the North-East comes largely from networking with the locals in a crowded showing of a porn film. When interrogated by the army, he begins to pretend that he is Russian to get it over with, and only escapes because the base is bombed. He becomes Sir James' assistant not because he has the skills or experience, but because he knew his daughter and just happened to be there when Professor Stewart (Crowden) committed suicide. "It's not what you know, it's who you know" may be a trite point to make, but Anderson plays it through with relish to show how hollow capitalist meritocracy can be.As perfectly valid and interesting as these points may be, they often get misplaced or buried amongst the increasingly ridiculous series of events. Travis is supposed to be an everyman and yet his experiences become so fantastical that even when the allegory is played for obvious effect, they never quite tap into the nub of the issues. One could argue that this was done out of respect for the audience, with Anderson believing they could fill in the blanks rather than needing to be lectured. But there is too little for us to grip onto in our bid to decode the most esoteric elements, and at its worst the film resembles Sleeper, having to constantly be outlandish or wacky to keep things moving forward.The tone of O Lucky Man! lurches around uncontrollably. The scenes in Dr. Millar's institute are played straight to maximise the horror, with certain scenes resembling H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. But other scenes are almost parodies of Anderson's earlier work - the scene where Travis attempts to coax Mrs. Richards out of committing suicide is a total piss-take of kitchen-sink dialogue. Mrs. Richards is played by Rachael Roberts, star of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, who would tragically take her own life in 1980.The recurrence of cast members like Graham Crowden, Rachael Roberts and Arthur Lowe give the impression that O Lucky Man! was partly or wholly made to get the old gang back together. Anderson was less confident that he had been on If.... and parts of the film feel that he was making it up as he went along (albeit not without success). Alan Price's band were incorporated into the film as a modern-day Greek chorus because Anderson had wanted to make a documentary about them but couldn't afford the licensing costs.On top of all that, O Lucky Man! is littered with moments which are so completely out of left field that you have to pinch yourself. The strangest of these comes at Travis' trial when the judge goes back into his chambers, strips off to reveal next to nothing under his gown and is roundly whipped by the usher. Anderson could be making a point about public school habits or sexual perversity behind closed doors. But it does feel like we've wandered into the Monty Python sketch where the two judges strip off while talking about "waggling wigs" and "banging gavels".O Lucky Man! is a sprawling and bizarre follow-up from Anderson, which confuses as much as it stimulates or enthrals. McDowell is excellent in the lead, giving us some form of a charismatic anchor for the story as it floats on increasingly choppy waters. Like The Bed-Sitting Room before it, it has a number of interesting and relevant ideas which are let down by their peculiar execution, and both films require immense patience to be fulfilling. It's massively and tragically flawed, but somehow still compelling.

Rating:
Verdict: Sprawing but somewhat satisfying

Batman Forever (USA, 1995)
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Chris O'Donnell

Changing the director in the middle of a franchise can create seismic differences in the quality of the respective instalments. Sometimes this is for the better: Alfonso Cuaron lifted the Harry Potter series with Prisoner of Azkaban, bringing a real sense of magic and wonder where Chris Columbus had failed on both counts. On other occasions, such as this one, the franchise does not benefit, resulting in a film with none of the weight of Tim Burton's instalments and which is nothing more nor less than a little bit boring.The key to understanding Batman Forever lies in the relationship between Tim Burton and his replacement Joel Schumacher. Despite having left the director's chair after the mixed reception of Batman Returns, Burton stayed on to produce the third instalment at the behest of Warner Brothers. While this did not give him anything resembling creative control, it did give him a certain amount of power on the set, so that he could always step in if he felt that things were going too far off the rails.As a result of Burton's presence there is some degree of continuity between the universe of Returns and Forever. Despite its gaudier design and campier style, it doesn't feel entirely like you've switched over to the TV series right after watching the second film. Certain sections, such as the death of Bruce's parents, have been reshot so that they retain their existing composition but with the new colour scheme and editing style. By making the head of Arkham Asylum a goofy-haired man called Dr. Burton, the series tips its hat to his style and sensibility, acknowledging that without him we would never have got this far.But while we are ostensibly in the same Gotham City, the emphasis has been shifted away from expressionist architecture and dark anti-heroes, and onto something a lot more frivolous. Where Burton uses style as a means of expressing deeper themes or character traits, Schumacher is all about style for its own sake, and never mind the story. This reflects their respective beginnings as filmmakers: Burton cut his teeth in animation, creating drawings which had to speak a thousand words, while Schumacher started out designing costumes for Woody Allen's Sleeper.What we end up with is a film which is lit to within an inch of its life, but scripted to a bare minimum. Like the TV series, there is a central plot which is relatively thin and largely implausible, around which action set-pieces can be positioned and stretched out for as long as is necessary. There are big references to Schumacher's back catalogue throughout - the street gang with fluorescent make-up are a re-tuning of the vampires from The Lost Boys, while the scenes with Nicole Kidman's psychiatrist tread very close to the dialogue in Flatliners.Batman Forever is often cited as the point when the Batman series shifted from being about the comics to being about the merchandise. Many fans have cited Val Kilmer's opening lines about "getting drive-through" as the moment at which the franchise jumped the shark. There is a large amount of truth in this: the shift towards brighter colours, sillier villains and the increased hardware available to Batman points towards a desire to sell action figures and lunchboxes rather than something more grown-up.

But while there is a market-driven edge to this Batman instalment, it is not as crass or as cynical as it could have been. The plot is at best ironic and at worst duplicitous - creating an evil weapon which warps people's minds through television, when whole sections of the film resemble a commercial, at least in the way that they are lit. But it doesn't force the merchandise down the viewer's throat like Batman and Robin did, and compared to the work of Michael Bay it's totally harmless.For its first 45 minutes, the predominant reaction to Batman Forever is not betrayal or disgust but boredom. The opening set-piece, involving Two Face's elaborate heist and a safe full of acid, feels dragged out and is played for laughs way too obviously. The stunts become increasingly preposterous and the supporting characters have less personality than in the Burton films.

Whereas in Batman Returns there was a sense of all the villains and some of the bystanders having minds of their own, the security guard in the bank is confined to whining "Oh no!" with increasing desperation. There is less of a role for Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon, and Michael Gough is increasingly sidelined. During the set-pieces Schumacher's love of aesthetics becomes frequently overbearing. In the sequence on the rocks near the Riddler's lair, there is so much green on the screen that you can't see what's going on. It's like watching Flash Gordon without the wit or directorial vision.The performances reflect this sense frustration. Val Kilmer is a plank as Bruce Wayne, and has an off-putting, haughty quality which conveys that Kilmer thought he was above the role. When he's in the bat-suit, he unwittingly pouts in almost every scene, as though he saw wearing the mask as an excuse to stop acting, at least with his face. Jim Carrey does an awful lot of gurning as Edward Nigma, and he only stops being annoying when he's being reined in by Tommy Lee Jones, who genuinely gets the character and seems to be having fun.Nicole Kidman, whose character was written specifically for the film, spends an awful lot of her screen time doing nothing but wandering around in a little black dress. Like Kim Basinger in the first film, whatever attempt is made to build her character up as intelligent is eventually undone; she ends up as a damsel in distress, accompanied by a gratuitous upskirt shot as she falls out of the tube. And Chris O'Donnell never entirely convinces either as Dick Grayson or as Robin. When he pretends to be Batman while facing the street gang, we're laughing at him as much as with him.However, after we have cantered through the Riddler's backstory and drunk our fill of pouting, whinging, gurning and flirting, Batman Forever finally kicks into gear and starts to have a plot which feels like it has something to say. It stops being an overgrown kid playing with toys and becomes a film about repression of childhood memories.Where the previous two films dealt with Batman as an outsider, who may be no better than the villains he is fighting, Batman Forever asks the question of whether Bruce Wayne can ever live with himself, as Batman and as a fractured human being. There is continuity from Batman Returns in the role of women; Chase makes a passing reference to Catwoman on the rooftop, and she proves instrumental in helping Bruce come to terms with himself.The point seems to be that the central dilemma of Batman is always the same - where does the man end and the bat begin, both in terms of personality and in terms of authorit. The various villains or sideshows which Batman encounters are just different ways of asking the same questions, whether through violence (Two-Face), riddles (The Riddler) or seduction (Chase). Considering what happened with the sequel, one could argue that this is just a ploy to have infinite new villains turn up in infinite new films, but at least the film has the guts to raise one of the central issues of the comics, even if it handles it with kid gloves.Batman Forever is a noisy, incoherent and often dull third instalment of a franchise which was already showing signs of fatigue. For all its good intentions and attempts to grapple with several ideas, it never follows through enough with any of them to cut the mustard, resorting to special effects to disguise Schumacher's shortcomings as a storyteller. But despite this, it's passingly entertaining, with Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey eventually coming through with the goods as a double act. It's a consistent and inoffensive disappointment; if only the same could be said for the sequel.

Rating:
Verdict: An inoffensive disappointment

Airplane! (USA, 1980)
Directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker
Starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges

It’s long been argued that horror and comedy are very close together, something amply demonstrated by a wide range of directors. On the one-hand we have the blood-soaked romps of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson; on the other hand, we have the dark quirky wit of the Coen brothers.

Airplane! demonstrates this affinity in a different way – by being so funny it’s physically painful. Thirty years on this spoof to end all spoofs will still have the corners of your mouth starting to ache as you constantly grin at the chaos unfolding. Most if not all of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny and the film successfully sustains this hilarity over a breathless ninety minutes. While not quite the funniest comedy ever made, it is definitely in the top five.One could be forgiven for viewing Airplane! with some form of contempt because of the comedy legacy it has left behind. Its particular style of quick-fire wordplay and oddball slapstick has certainly produced a lot of funny work. But ever since the third Naked Gun film, the talents of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker have steadily ebbed away, and somehow we have ended up with the Scary Movie franchise and the pathetic parodies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. Fortunately, one quick viewing of this trio’s first film is more than enough to put such feelings to bed.

Because of its incessant level of gags, the natural point of comparison would seem to be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In fact, in my review of Holy Grail, I remarked that only Airplane! has ever matched the Pythons’ film for sheer unrelenting laughter. And there are technical similarities between the two films, since were both made by first-time directors on very low budgets, and neither has any kind of underlying political message – these are not comedies which argue that mediaeval warfare is barbaric or that air travel is inhumane.However, while Holy Grail feels meticulously mapped out and builds very subtly, Airplane! is a much more ramshackle concoction. The jokes are chucked at the screen in quick succession, and often the plot slows right down so all the gags have a chance to play out. In this way, the film owes much more to the farcical slapstick traditions of Blake Edwards and the early films Woody Allen. Think of it as The Party on a plane, or Sleeper without the time travel (or any of Allen’s neuroticism).

Airplane! is at heart a spoof or satire of disaster movies, a genre which gave us The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and the Airport series from which this chiefly stems. The script is lifted virtually verbatim from Zero Hour!, a much-famed 1950s disaster movie starring Sterling Hayden, who would later play General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.By coincidence, the career of Sterling Hayden helps to illuminate why Airplane! not only succeeds but flourishes. In Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick took a piece of serious-minded political fiction (the Peter George novel Red Alert) and restaged it as an absurdist comedy. He achieved this by casting ‘serious’ actors like Hayden and George C. Scott, and getting them to deliver their lines absolutely straight, to the point of tricking Scott over which takes were used in the final cut. The characters take the talk of ‘precious bodily fluids’ and ‘mineshaft gaps’ so seriously, that it is impossible not to burst out laughing as the situation gets ever more ridiculous.Airplane! works on precisely the same principle. Before their performances in this film, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen were respected, ‘serious’ actors; Peter Graves even turned it down as first, calling it “tasteless trash”. As in Dr. Strangelove, none of the actors in the film know that they are being funny; if any one character were in on the joke, the entire film would collapse. Under these circumstance, we laugh at the absurdity of the dialogue, and the visual gags come in to enhance lines which before wouldn’t have seemed funny at all.As with Holy Grail, it is impossible to point off every joke in Airplane!, but we can identify categories into which the various jokes fall. We have broad slapstick humour, such as the woman running into metal towers as the ‘train’ speeds away, and the later scene of the hysterical passenger being slapped. We have visual gags, such as Rex Kramer driving his car against an erratic backdrop and Dr. Rumake doing a spot of gynaecology in the aisle. We have moments of great wordplay, like the immortal lines: “Surely you can’t be serious?”, “I am serious – and don’t call me Shirley”. And there is a whole stream of running gags, from the faux-foreign language translations to Lloyd Bridges confessing he picked the wrong week to quit a certain vice.The film also finds time to satirise both war films and the growing trend of Vietnam films; the project was green-lit shortly after the success of The Deer Hunter and was shooting while Apocalypse Now came out. Ted Striker’s bad experiences in ‘the war’ mark him out as a Vietnam vet, but both the script and the use of black-and-white stock footage refer to World War II. Intercutting sounds of plane crashes with early footage of failed flying machines is a simple but effective way of satirising war, and Striker’s ridiculous ‘drink problem’ is a pithy send-up of the kind of trauma suffered by soldiers. It could be worse – he could be left thinking he was Ethel Merman.

Although it never relies on self-reflexivity, or any real sense of ‘knowingness’, Airplane! does contain several examples of what could be called self-reflective casting against type. These casting decisions don’t contribute a great deal to the experience of watching the film, but they are a demonstration of the writers’ intelligence and enough to raise a wry smile among film buffs. The most obvious of these is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s casting as Co-Pilot Roger Murdoch, who is revealed by the young boy Jimmy to be Abdul-Jabbar’s alter ego. Ethel Merman (in her last film role) plays the soldier who thinks he’s Ethel Merman, and June Cleaver, who starred in the squeaky-clean white suburban drama Leave It to Beaver, plays the woman who ‘speaks jive’ to the African-American characters.Some elements of Airplane! are questionable. On the one hand, accusations of racism are misplaced, since the ‘jive-speaking’ characters are not portrayed as being stupid, and the subtitling of their conversations into deliberately stuffy English is funny. And the really uncomfortable scenes of Peter Graves using sexually suggestive slang are deliberate bad taste and well-played. But there are moments in which the film becomes dumb or boring, usually in the sequences which involve relatively large amounts of nudity. As with John Landis’ Into the Night, the frequent presence of flesh seems unnecessary, not because it’s exploitative, but because it’s a cheap laugh, or in most cases, not a laugh at all.Airplane! is undoubtedly a comedy classic which has dated extraordinarily well for a parody. Perhaps the ultimate proof of its deserved reputation is that the films it satirised have long since faded from the public eye. What was once taken seriously, to the point of Oscar nominations, has faded in the face of a comedy that always hits its mark and pokes fun at areas where you thought there was no fun to be had. Most of all, it’s a hilarious and thrilling comedy ride which almost gives the Pythons a run for their money.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: Relentlessly and breathlessly funny

Sleeper (USA, 1973)
Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Maria Small, Susan Miller

Where many serious dramatic or horror directors can hit the ground running first time out, comedy directors usually need a few films to find out what works and how well. John Landis is now widely revered as a comedy director but bits of Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House feel amateurish and slapdash. The same goes for Kevin Smith, although the foul-mouthed adolescence of Clerks is infinitely preferable to the mawkish sentimentality of Jersey Girl.

Sleeper falls into the same grouping. It's a decent, workable effort from Woody Allen which retains some of its charm and much of its humour. It isn't in the same league as Annie Hall, Manhattan or Hannah and her Sisters, and elements of it have become more irritating than funny over time. But it's an interesting venture from a young filmmaker who hadn't quite figured out what shape his career was going to take.Much like its predecessor, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Sleeper has its roots in the episodic, observational vignettes of Allen's early writing and stand-up. It has a more narrative structure than 'Sex, and its characters are somewhat more developed, but it remains a hotchpotch of many different ideas and literary sources. Like a stand-up routine, these individual ideas or elements are not there to be explored in any kind of depth; they are only included for as long as they are funny, an observation which will prove useful in helping us to assess the film.

Sleeper draws on a wide range of dystopian science fiction, both from page and screen. The central premise of a man waking up after two hundred years is loosely based on H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Wakes, but instead of our protagonist waking up as the richest man in the world (due to compound interest), he is merely confused and out of place. In that respect the film owes an equal debt to the Mark Twain story A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, only with the direction of time travel reversed. There are also thematic references to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the latter especially in the prominent position of drugs and casual sex. And visually the film reflects the sci-fi ventures of Stanley Kubrick, combining the stark white interiors of 2001 with the peculiar fashions of A Clockwork Orange.In a serious-minded sci-fi film this would be all well and good, but Allen marries it instead to the melodramatic slapstick of Buster Keaton and the tart one-liners of the Marx Brothers. The film is on one level Allen paying homage to his comedy heroes; he gives us the most elaborate and funniest banana skin joke in any film, and performs his own version of the mirror trick from Duck Soup. Both of these scenes are funny in their own small way, but they also hint at the central problem with the film as a whole.

There can be no doubt from watching Sleeper than Allen is an intelligent filmmaker. Most of what made his observational stand-up so enjoyable remains both in the caustic one-liners of Miles Monroe and the fleeting jibes he makes at revered social institutions like the Catholic Church. In one early scene, he is shown a series of photographs and television clips and asked to identify key historical figures. Allen is in his element here, tearing into reputations which took generations to build up with a series of perfectly balanced put-downs, which walk the tightrope between clever and stupid and make it safely to the other side.

Sleeper is a high concept film in nature, since it has one central idea which the rest of the script has to bend over backwards to support. Just as Jaws wouldn't work if you weren't constantly scared, so Sleeper would quickly fall apart if you ever stopped laughing and started to pick this brave new world apart. Generally this doesn't happen, since Allen's verbal comedy nearly always hits the mark, but the film does feel like he has chucked everything and the kitchen sink at the screen to stop you questioning the logic of the world he has created.The biggest problem with Sleeper is that so many different forms of comedy are being employed, and in such a slapdash, desperate manner, that a lot of the substance and intellect gets buried underneath passing entertainment. In Annie Hall, the long speeches about anti-Semitism or the encounter with Marshal McLuhan are not rushed along in a desperate bid to get to the next joke; Allen, as both a writer and director, takes his time, letting a scene unfold and the comedy to develop at the required pace.

In Sleeper, on the other hand, all of the brilliant gags about religion, revolution and relationships are swept along and quickly forgotten. It's like running around a sweet shop in a desperate bid to sample everything; it's fun, and you have some idea of how it's going to end, but you never get the chance to stop and appreciate each individual moment of craft.An equally apt comparison, considering the references to Kubrick, would be with Dr. Strangelove, another film which took a deeply serious prospect and succeeded in making it seem ridiculous (Sleeper does actually reference Strangelove -- notice that 'the leader' is in a wheelchair and has a similar haircut). Dr. Strangelove works so well, on one level, because it identifies exactly what kind of comedy it wants to be very early on: the script is rooted in absurdist humour and supported by Kubrick's focus on the Freudian undertones of power. Sleeper doesn't have that level of consistency, and in its weaker moments towards the end it does feel like it is clutching at straws.

On top of the general feeling of fleetingness and inconsistency, parts of Sleeper are just really, really annoying. The slapstick scenes are scored with Allen playing clarinet with his ragtime band. On paper this sound fine, since silent comedy has always been backed by music and the clarinet was used in 'Dance of the Cuckoos', the famous Laurel and Hardy theme. But in the film itself it's really grating, being mixed far too loud and undermining some of the best visual jokes in the process. Plus, if you can get beyond the neuroticism of Allen's character (i.e. you realise that he's not just playing himself), you still have to deal with Diane Keaton; for a lot of the film her character is greatly unlikeable, and no matter how much irony there is on screen we struggle to care about her for some time.
Sleeper is a comedy which is equal parts grating and grin-inducing. So much of what Allen does here is annoying, or repetitive, or too much of a diversion from the central concept. But the film never really stops being funny, and thus it continues to work as a comedy. Whether it's the running joke about the exploding guns or the well-crafted put-downs, you'll find a certain aspect of Sleeper that will tickle your funny bone. It isn't as well-crafted as Dr. Strangelove, nor do its jokes carry the story as well as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But it still works well both as a slice of clownish escapism and as a reminder of the greatness which has long since diminished.

Rating: 3/5
Verdict: An enjoyable mess