Masterly chaos as Steve Coogan stars in stage reboot of Dr Strangelove
★★★½
CTC. 150 minutes. In cinemas
Armando Iannucci's latest excursion into the wackiest regions of the political world is here. The man who brought us The Death of Stalin has revived Stanley Kubrick's absurdist classic, Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, judging quite rightly that its particular brand of insanity is in tune with our times.
He and director and co-writer Sean Foley have produced it as a play for Britain's National Theatre and the filmed version of one of its West End performances is in the cinemas as part of the NT LIVE series.
Steve Coogan, Iannucci's collaborator on the satirical British TV series featuring Alan Partridge, is cast in the roles originally played by Peter Sellers, including both Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist, and the US president, whom Strangelove likes to call 'Mein Fuhrer'. Old habits die hard.
As you can tell, subtlety was never part of the film's appeal. Its caricatures are broad, as are its jokes, but it presents a masterly display of choreographed chaos set in motion by Jack D. Ripper (John Hopkins), a deranged American general who is about to send a squadron of B-52s off to Russia with orders to drop a nuclear bomb. A man of many obsessions, General Ripper strikes a contemporary note with his belief that water fluoridation is a Russian plot aimed at robbing him and other similarly macho males of their 'natural bodily fluids'.
Ripper is in charge of a US Air Force base in Britain when he makes his momentous decision and the first person to hear about it is Group Captain Mandrake (Coogan again), a mild-mannered and very English Englishman who manages to contact the Pentagon. A clutch of five-star generals then start falling over one another in their competing efforts to find the nuclear recall code and avert the end of the world.
Filmed theatre is a strange hybrid. No matter how artfully it's shot, it leaves you feeling rather remote from the action. Nonetheless, Strangelove is, in essence, so overblown that theatricality is all part of the experience. We move between the British base, the Pentagon war room and one of the B-52s and in each place, the craziest person present is getting the upper hand. The B-52 has a gung-ho pilot set on carrying out his mission despite the protests of his crew.
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