Early Man
Dir: Nick Park
2018
**
This really pains me to say, but Nick Park’s Early
Man isn’t very good. I adore everything that has come out of Aardman Animations
thus far and I think Nick Park is a champion of Britishness but
Early Man misses the mark at every step of the way. It started off well, with a
strong cast of British voice’s including Eddie Redmayne,
Timothy Spall, Richard Ayoade,
Selina Griffiths, Johnny Vegas, Mark Williams and Gina Yashere who
all make up a small group of silly but instantly lovable Cave persons. The
humour is slight, cheeky, a little bit surreal and extremely draft. Perfect, I
thought to myself, a very simple but higly detailed
story about Cave dwellers much in the vein of Park’s previous works Creature Comforts
and Wallace & Gromit, and all the things
that have influenced Aardman over
the years, such as Monty Python and The Goodies. Tom Hiddleston,
Rob Brydon, Kayvan
Novak and the brilliant Miriam Margolyes join
the cast later on in the film, but not before the story takes a dramatic turn
for the worse. I’m not sure I would have gone to see the film at the cinema
(which was cold and lonely by the way) if I had known it was about football
(ugh, Soccer). Suddenly the beautifully simple Cave dweller theme was taken
over by the Bronze Age (literally) and everything became about a nonsensical
football match. The jokes started falling flatter and flatter and everything
great about the first ten minutes of the film becomes a distant memory. Some of
the voice work was actually pretty rubbish too if I’m being honest. Kayvan
Novak is known for his silly voices but here he is
given nothing but a sensible character to work with. I will have to trust Nick
Park that it was the real Tom Hiddleston who
voiced the film’s villain and the funniest characters in the film played by
Richard Ayoade, Johnny Vegas and
Mark Williams got about three lines each. I didn’t think I’d want an Aardman film
to be sillier, they’re usually silly
enough, but Early Man, a film with a terribly silly premise, is just too darn
serious. Where was the Nick Park observational humour and the general
daftness? However, I love that so much Britishness has
been kept in he film that usually wouldn’t see the likes of day due to its
insular humour. Much of it will probably go
over the heads of anyone not from the UK but I don’t know why we pander to it
so much as a nation. There are loads of American references that we don’t
understand in Hollywood films – we either let them slide or we research them –
it’s never really a problem and I guess were used to it. A Nick Park film
wouldn’t be true if it didn’t have its Britishness about
it. For example; Maisie Williams’s character is called Goona –
this is what Arsenal Football fans are often referred to as, Johnny Vegas is
called Asbo, which is a an
‘Anti-social behaviour order, typically given to naughty kids and Brian and
Bryan are based on two famous football pundits. You can google what
a zebra crossing is yourselves. Apart from the ‘Britishness’, the tiny glimpse
of Park humour of yesteryear and the giant duck, I’m afraid – as unlikable as
Early Man isn’t, I felt it to be somewhat of a let down. I didn’t enjoy writing
this review one bit.
