I saw Magicians, starring Mitchell and Webb, last night on Netflix.
Here's what I wrote on Amazon:
'I've not written an Amazon review for months, but I watched this on Netflix last night and it is unbelievably bad.
It's not even that it's offensively bad. It's a 90-minute bucket of magnolia paint that barely registers. But when you consider the talent involved that is preposterous.
Let's take a brief look at just how many insanely talented comic actors are in this film. Obviously Mitchell and Webb are the stars, but we also have Peter Capaldi, Jessica Hynes, Darren Boyd, Steve Edge, Miranda Hart and basically every single other British comedy actor that ever appeared in Peep Show, The Thick Of It or any other British comedy around 2007.
Then consider that I didn't laugh for pretty much the first forty-five minutes, and maybe only three or four times after that. Capaldi gets a couple of laughs as the shady magic promoter, Boyd is amusing as a closeted agent. Reading the Wiki on this film after watching it I found out that it's actually written by the same people as Peep Show, and is the same rating (15), and yet is absolutely lacking in the brilliantly dark, awkward humour of that programme.
The staging and direction is bland, the whole thing looks cheap, everyone is working far too hard for the laughs which just don't come.
This is awful, but not even awful enough that you remember it. I'm amazed I remembered it 12 hours later to write this review.'
