Seize Them!: this amateurish, Horrible Histories-style Britcom is full of missed opportunities
Being funny with Dark Age clichés shouldn’t be a challenge, even if you have to trudge off-script and simply cover yourself in mud. The cast of Seize Them!, a plucky shoestring Britcom about a peasant revolution, unfortunately face an uphill battle.
Not literally – there’s nowhere near enough budget here to have hordes of extras clanging around in armour. Good jokes cost nothing, though. Andy Riley’s script, alas, fires off 20 gags a minute with a subprime hit-rate, while director Curtis Vowell, in his first film outside New Zealand, ought to have shown more confidence in letting the cast ad lib.
We begin with a silly, vain queen called Dagan (Aimee Lou Wood) being abruptly deposed in her own castle and escaping through an upstairs poo hatch. Her usurper is a self-styled people’s champion dubbed “Humble Joan” (Nicola Coughlan), though she prefers “merely Joan”, which sounds even more humble.
Coughlan strides in with purpose and immediately gets some laughs, so it’s a pity Joan’s relegated to being a fairly menial baddie, mostly off-screen, for the rest of the film. Having her and Dagan butt heads in an honest-to-goodness queen-off is one opportunity missed.
Instead, Dagan flees in the company of a pair of loyal serfs, played by Lolly Adefope and Nick Frost. That the film achieves a baseline amiability is largely down to these two – not so much Wood, who’s playing an intentional bratty irritant. We get ho-hum bits about peasant food being unidentifiable, and a horse plague having killed all the horses (budget-conscious line, that).
It does meander genially enough – and it’s pleasing to see a lowbrow comedy making fresh use of the British landscape, attractively hiking around Kent and the Welsh coast.
And when the right gag gets exactly the right spin – like Frost’s Bobick saying “I was born in a bin” – it’s a rare moment of lift-off. At least Paul Kaye and John MacMillan get to do some delightfully daft Scandinavian accents as a pair of visiting Vikings who invade in a canoe.
But there are moments where a better punchline was sitting right there. A turncoat schemer called Leofwine (Jessica Hynes, who’s having some fun) is on the prowl, and there’s a promising scene where the main trio have to tip her off a cliff: had they done a gross splatter, then an inappropriately OTT cheer, it would have sold the whole sequence. Such chances leave a third star hanging in the balance. Instead, they’re unseized.
15 cert, 91 min. In cinemas from Friday
