I was kind of excited for this, cause I like Johnny Vegas. I gotta say I enjoyed it, but not as much as I'd like.
What we have is the typical murder mystery set-up. Passengers on a coach tour are being bumped off. All the characters are various degrees of awful, or hiding secrets, and all are going for quirky.
Ostensibly, we should have some sort of investigation going on, but the film gets to the hour mark of its 90 minutes before any of the characters even realise that there's a killer on the loose.
Which is the first problem of the show. We have a murder mystery without any clues or investigation, so what we're doing is just watching people get knocked off and not getting any idea why.
What's left is the comedy, which is very hit and miss. The staging is very TV-like, with flat shot composition and no interesting shots. Poirot was made for TV and it was better than this, although I suspect the production values are much lower here.
Visually, it is uninspired, with perfunctory direction. The camera barely moves.
The acting is pretty bad across the board. It seems the actors were instructed to act as if they were in a farce, perhaps? Meaning it all comes off like an amateur stage play, with line delivery made by people standing around just saying things that are sometimes funny.
The main couple do quite well, though, with good chemistry between Vegas and Sian. Everyone else, though talented, feels like this is their first picture. The overacting grates after a while.
(I wasn't surprised to see that many of them were from Corrie...)
What doesn't help is the pretty poor writing. The script is all over the place, not brilliantly funny, and just kind of amusing. It'll get a chuckle or a smile out of you, but nothing on the level of, say, the better Carry Ons.
We have such great lines as:
"Heads don't just fall off!"
Delivered with all the conviction of a sausage bap at a petrol station.
All in all, an amusing watching, that'll get a smile or two, but won't get much else from you.
