Hands up if you had no idea that The Festival was coming out until a few weeks or a month ago at the latest? I certainly fall into that camp, and it was quite a surprise to suddenly see a movie on the IMDb coming soon page from the creator of The Inbetweeners, which I'm sure most of you will have heard of. Aside from the IMDb page and a single bus banner, however, I struggled to find any information about this movie. There is no Wikipedia page available for it, there's little to no budgetary information available for this thing, and the trailers themselves seemed to have been released a month ago, around the same time this movie seemed to pop into existence. Why, you might ask? Why would a movie choose not to advertise itself until a month before release? And why oh why, would a studio want to realise a movie like this where it is sure to be eaten alive by the like of Christopher Robin releasing this weekend, as well as continuing giants The Meg and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again? The answer is quite simple: the movie is not even remotely good and the people who made it know it. I watched no trailers for this movie as I had no plans to see it, but the warning signs were all there. The problem I face now, having watched the film, is that I genuinely have no idea where to start with this movie. I've managed to narrow the movie down to three main elements which I need to focus on: the story; the characters and acting; and the humour. This is not the type of movie where I should necessarily be talking about cinematography (which is bland and unimaginative, featuring an overabundance of shots of the whole festival from the sky), or about the editing, or any of the technical aspect (however poorly executed they may be) as this is not the type of movie where these are the focus. Therefore, you can take it for granted that these elements are passable at best, but given that this is not the kind of movie to focus on these, they are not going to add to the movie experience. One small element which is worth mentioning is the music. Given that most of the action takes place at a music festival, director Iain Morris obviously wanted to take the opportunity to include some popular festival songs. It's clear that he loves Mr. Brightside by the Killers, given that I heard that song being used a minimum of three times. The problem is that the movie was filmed largely at the Leeds Music Festival in 2017 and that in itself offers a chance for some live music performances in the midst of films. That might be considered too much to ask, but I don't think it is asking too much for more than three or four popular songs to be used throughout the movie. With this set up, I think expecting a more creative approach is fair.
With those small qualms having been dealt with, let's start examining the three main problems of the movie with the story. Ultimately this one's pretty simple: the movie is nothing you have not seen before and is extremely predictable. The story involves the uptight and not-very-fun Nick (played by The Inbetweeners' Joe Thomas) making a fool of himself at his university graduation when he breaks up with his girlfriend Caitlin (Hannah Tointon). In an attempt to make him feel better, he is dragged to a music festival by best friend Shane (Hammed Animashaun), where he is forced to try and embrace the fun, music, and mud. Thrown in are some subplots relating to strange religious ceremonies, Smurfs, and one-legged Amercian bouncers, but these amount to little more than unfunny bit jokes that I'll come to later. If the main plot sounds clichéd, you'd be right. This is a paper thin story that moves along predictably, with no surprising or funny twists and turns. The entire movie is a series of half-scenes, by which I mean scenes just happen, they do not start and they do not end. There are a number of scenes which start in the middle of conversations, while the main focus of the scene more than often has no set up. Scenes end without any resolution or proper conclusion, and then we swiftly move to another situation. If it sounds like I do not have much to say about the plot, then I'm sorry but there is simply not much to say. All this is is a story about a young guy trying to get back with his ex, while simultaneously making a fool of himself and learning to loosen up. The fact that the movie is set at a music festival is completely coincidental and does not in any way add to the generic plot and pacing. The only thing the movie does which is even remotely different is completely wrap up the ex-girlfriend story halfway through the movie...before restarting the movie and having Nick try to find a girl he spent the night with. If this sounds like a complete nightmare to follow, then you're completely right. All this sudden restart seems to offer is a way to pad out the runtime from a 45-50 minute movie to a 100-minute slog that will have you hating every single moment of the movie. The movie is bloated, predictable, and simply dull. The script is the killer of the movie, and is the source of all of its problems. Believe it or not, however, the plot is the least of the scripts issues.
The face of Nick (Joe Thomas) on the right sums up watching the movie fairly well
The characters, and in turn the acting, is the next step up in where the movie fails. It is still possible for a movie to have very little plot, but to still be extremely well done as a character piece, with the dynamics and development of characters being enough to carry a movie. However, when the movie has characters as weak as these, the experience becomes considerably more irritating. The movie is populated by cardboard cut outs and irritating personalities who surround our three main characters (who we'll dive into in a little bit). From Chris Geere's Brother David to Nick Frost's tattooist to Jemaine Clement's overenthusiastic father-in-law Robin, characters flit in and out of the movie at a moments notice, offering little progression and typically existing for the sole purpose of making one of the movie's sex-based jokes, which make up roughly 95% of the humour in the movie. I'm getting ahead of myself on the humour, though, so we'll come to that soon. The performances from all of the supporting cast are not especially memorable, and I find myself thankful that this movie has an IMDb page at the very least so I can check the names of the characters. The main three offenders, however, are the three leads, who we can go through in turn. Let's start with Claudia O'Doherty's Amy, a festival maniac who our two best friends meet on the train to the festival and who Nick views as forcing herself on them, desperate to be their friends. The entire schtick of this character is that they are annoying, talking for obscene amounts of time without allowing anyone else to get a word in and generally just having quite a grating personality. To O'Doherty's credit, she pulls off this aspect of the character quite perfectly, and she is sure to get on your nerves quickly once she enters the movie. The problem is, however, that being annoying and nothing else is not an excuse. There is some attempt later to explain how she never has any friends and thereby hoping to give the character some emotional depth, but O'Doherty never plays this seriously, instead laughing it off and stopping us as an audience from feeling any emotional connection because of this. If she doesn't care then why should we? This is a problem both for the script - which underdeveloped this - and for the actress - who never plays it seriously enough at the brief intervals where this is attempt. Secondly we have Hammed Animashaun's best friend character Shane. I'll correct myself, sorry, because to use the word "character" in relation to Shane is an insult to better films. Shane has no personality traits outside of being a best friend, and he exists solely to have the extremely predictable moment in the later half of the film where he gets annoyed at the main character only to drop this immediately after. The only other thing he has going for him is that he creates his own music, and is obsessed with a DJ called Hammerhead who wears a mask and just so happens to be playing at the festival. Bet you can't guess where that goes. There's precious little to say about Shane, and honestly you feel bad for Animashaun, who has no material to work with outside of the relationship with Nick, which never feels genuine or remotely believable. With that, we finally come to Joe Thomas' Nick, whose entire character revolves around the fact that he is unlikeable. The character arc he goes on focuses on his transition from being a selfish, uptight, and unlikeable person to a loosened up person...who is still unlikeable. The transition is one that happens with the flick of a switch with no real reason for the change. Indeed, the reason for the change makes no sense, and in actuality should have made Nick worse. The basic problem is that Nick, and indeed everyone else in the movie, is extremely loathsome. They don't change, their personalities are not entertaining or engaging, and they don't act like humans. You spend an hour and 40 minutes of your time watching people who you hate and have unbelievable dynamics. Ultimately, no matter how bad the events of the movie, thanks to the writing and the acting, you can't help but feel, at the end of day, for these people, it could've been worse.
You deserve a medal if you can buy for a second that these two are best friends
With the plot, characters, and acting dealt with, we come to the greatest crime the movie commits: the humour. All of the jokes in the movie think they are much funnier than they actually are, and quite frankly you are more likely to cringe or become completely confused watching the movie. The humour becomes all the more irritating when you realise that most jokes in the movie is based around one of two topics: toilet humour, or sexual antics. When every scene involves a joke relating to one of these two, and you begin to predict what the joke of the scene, adding to the boredom you feel watching the movie anyway. Take for example a scene in a forest (it of course starts halfway through a conversation, there is no set up to the religious group involved in the scene, and of course there is no real resolution or point to the scene). Two characters stumble upon a religious group about to partake in a marriage, with the laughs seemingly meant to be coming from the reaction to discovering the group. Of course, it soon becomes apparent that the "funny part" of the scene relates to who the man in the marriage is getting married to, and this of course leads to yet another sex joke. The whole movie is incredibly unimaginative and seems content to repeat the same jokes over and over and over again. You still might laugh at the scene, and indeed at the movie, but you will only do so out of either how bad the movie is or the absurdity of the scenes. You might get 3 or 4 laughs total. There are perhaps two exceptions to the focus of the joke through the entire movie. One of these relates to one random recurring drunk character mistaking the main character for Harry Potter. This is one of the moments which might make you laugh out of pure absurdity. The other joke relates to an American bounce character called Pirate (because he has one leg...seriously) mishearing Nick's name and calling him "Lick" for the rest of the movie, which of course every other character finds hilarious and proceeds to join in on. Set aside how mean-spirited the entire joke is, the frequency with which the joke comes up make sit easily the most irritating joke in the entire film. In fact, most of the jokes in the movie, while relating to those topics, are incredibly hurtful. The best comedies relate to the situations characters find themselves in, but the worst focus wholly on jokes which make you laugh at others. There's no cleverness, no visual humour, nothing outside of jokes which are mean tot make you laugh at the misfortunes or jokes made towards others. It's a truly horrible and outright lazy script that is content with doing the bare minimum with the expectation that we as an audience will be willing to accept that.
Smurfs turning up is one of the less absurd jokes in the movie if you can believe it
There is not much left to say about The Festival quite honestly. It is a mess from start to finish, and frankly I wanted to leave around 5 minutes into the movie. It's not even entertainingly bad for the entire duration, the few laughs to be had stemming from the sheer absurdity of what is happening on screen at a few scattered points. For the most part, the movie is simply...bad. Bad is underselling it, of course, when the movie does literally nothing right. Everything that could possibly go wrong with a film like this goes wrong. This is without even considering technical elements such as the (dull) cinematography, (bad) editing, or the (forced) music tracks. The absolute killer of the movie is its dreadful script, which commits ever possible sin that a movie can commit. The story is generic and clichéd, being poorly paced out to make the 100-minute runtime feel significantly longer than it actually is. All of the characters are unlikeable, going through no development or changes over the course of the movie. Written terribly and being paired with terrible performances, it's fair to say they do not make watching the movie any easier. The script has no clever jokes and seems content to repeat the same jokes about toilets, sex, Harry Potter, and mean-spirited jokes about people's names. This movie did not exist a month ago, and it is easy now to see why. No matter how awful you expect this movie to be, it cannot match the experience of watching the final product.
Pros
Literally nothing
Cons
Unlikeable and underdeveloped characters
A generic and predictable plot
An absolutely horrendous script, with humour more likely to make you cringe or become confused
All laughs (all 4) are at the absurdity of the film
A bloated running time
Poor acting across the board
Uninspired music choices which are forced into the movie
Rating: 1/10
Original Release Date: 14th August, 2018
Starring Joe Thomas, Hammed Animashaun, Claudia O'Doherty, Jemaine Clement, Hannah Tointon, Kurt Yaeger, Theo Barklem-Biggs, Nick Frost, and Noel Fielding
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