|
Horrid Henry: The Movie
| Released |
29 July 2011 |
| Director |
Nick Moore |
Starring
|
Theo Stevenson, Richard E. Grant, Parminder Nagra, Kimberly Walsh, Matthew Horne, Anjelica Huston |
| Writer(s) |
Lucinda Whiteley |
Producer(s)
|
Rupert Preston, Lucinda Whiteley |
| Origin |
United Kingdom |
| Running Time |
90 minutes |
| Genre |
Comedy |
| Rating |
G |
|
|
Abysmal.
With more than sixteen million copies sold worldwide it was never going to take long for Francesca Simon's wildly popular Horrid Henry books to come to the big screen. Billed as the first ever British kids' movie to be filmed in 3D, Horrid Henry: The Movie stars Theo Stevenson as the irascible Henry, leader of the Purple Hand Gang whose constant run-ins with an array of villainous characters, namely adults, provides the majority of fodder for the series.
In this, the first movie adaptation of the books, Henry and his like-minded pals are determined to foil a plot by evil rival headmaster (Richard E. Grant) to have their school closed-down so that all the pupils will have to attend his own fee-paying establishment.
With plenty of noisy horseplay and colour, Horrid Henry: The Movie is an unapologetically juvenile output. Yet how director Nick Moore managed to entice Oscar winner Anjelica Huston to play the woefully awful character of Henry's teacher Miss Battle-Axe remains a mystery. Perhaps she required a rather large pay-check and that would explain the rather shoddy production and third-rate effects. Indeed Horrid Henry: The Movie looks more like a CITV Saturday morning programme with plenty of lurid green sludge and garish colours that could only entertain a child of five and under. While the cast clearly had a riot filming it and only a real Ebenezer Scrooge would begrudge them that, the frankly irritating truculent Stevenson and his fellow miscreants' constant smugness wears thin very quickly. Where the books have succeeded and where the movie fails is that Francesca Simon has the scope in her writing to bring some depth to the characters she evokes, whereas with time constraints and editing headaches it would appear that Moore's main priority was entertainment at the expense of everything else. Despite a cast peopled by the aforementioned Huston and Grant, with occasional random celebrity appearances from the likes of Jo Brand and Noel Fielding, no amount of star billing could save Horrid Henry: The Movie from being anything more than a trifling below-par production.
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Louisa McElwee |
