Comedy news: Big Fat Gypsy Gangster review

Tweet

Big Fat Gypsy Gangster is, on paper, a pretty ropey proposition. It's a British comedy. Worse, it's a spoof East End geezer film. It focuses on a claret-spitting man mountain called Bulla who's leaving prison and re-entering the real world. And it co-stars Tulisa from N-Dubz and Rufus Hound.

The film suffers from all the problems this description would suggest. But dig between the clichés, the often directionless plot and the sprawling cast, and there are some very funny comedy moments. 

Both the good and the bad appear to spring from the fact that this is very clearly a project of one man: Ricky Grover. He menacingly plays Bulla, and the best funny moments come when the film focuses in on him. His rambling description of his mother is a laugh-out-loud highlight (“She worked down the market pulling stalls. She was seven foot tall”; “I was born on a snooker table...she was two weeks in labour”). 

And there are other little touches that betray Ricky Grover's comedy eye. During the opening credits we see him throw his dwarf henchman through a van window to get in the vehicle in a hurry. It's a two-second shot hidden amongst a dull hard-man montage, but it nicely represents how there is the odd nugget of comedy gold in here.

So there are great lines and moments in the film, but the project also comes across as a singular vision that a script editor wasn't allowed near. The film is framed as being about an American documentary maker who is obsessed with East End gangster films, but it comes off so sneeringly about Americans that it acts more as a study of post-Empire attitudes than a comedy. It could easily have been ditched without taking anything away from the film.

There is also little direction to the story, with an awful lot of telling the audience about Bulla without actually showing us that much about him. Once you've seen one scene of cockney hard men shouting at each other like an episode of EastEnders, you've frankly seen them all. 

The sprawling cast, too, doesn't do the film any favours. How can Rochelle Wiseman, a member of The Saturdays, be unable to convincingly act as a girl band member? Why are Derek Acorah and Rufus Hound here? With an absence of any comic talent, they add up to the distractions rather than the presumed intention of providing a kaleidoscope to Bulla's personality. Even the two most high-profile names in the cast don't bring much to the table: Steven Berkoff's appearance as Bulla's guru is unmemorable, while Peter Capaldi's turn as his therapist doesn't bring much to the table.

The two noble exceptions are Omid Djalili's money man (usefully letting us know that Bulla's assets include a “fish and chip shop stroke shoe repair place”), and Laila Morse, better known as Big Mo off the EastEnders. Her role as Bulla's Aunt Queenie is like seeing Mo let off the leash in some post-watershed version of the soap.

All in all, it's a mixed bag of a film. The irony is that while this film feels like the untampered vision of one man, it would have been better to focus in tighter on the central character himself. But if you can stand the filler, there's some good ideas bubbling around.