Jolly Boys’ Last Stand
Billed on the IMDB as a drama, but marketed somewhat like a comedy, The Jolly Boys’ Last Stand appears to be a love letter for any group of lads whose lives have shifted away from pub crawls and intoxicated hijinks into relationships and love and adulthood. Narrated as a “wedding documentary” home movie shot by Des (Milo Twomey), the Last Stand refers to that of the Jolly Boys gang’s leader, Spider (Andy Serkis) quitting the group to get married and start saying things like, “we think the country is lovely.”
Serkis is best known for providing the physical performances behind Gollum and King Kong, though he was actually seen in King Kong and 13 Going on 30. Serkis here is a lad who is tired of the bar scene, but the actor cannot completely put away all his physical training. His body language speaks volumes between the relatively simple lines. It’s a guy movie about how guys communicate and grow up and move on from their party-boy lives, but it’s also a movie about the consequences of doing so. It’s a little aimless, but a lot genuine, with deadpan performances from a host of Serkis’ pub crawling friends. One such friend is Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G), whom we see far too little of but who help us understand the appeal of the group of friends better than anyone besides Twomey. Edward Woodall as the perennial bachelor has the worst case of arrested development but was underused when he could have been a portent of the fate that comes to Jolly Boys who try to stay hidden in their pints.
Written and directed by Christopher Payne, a relatively inexperienced filmmaker who wisely took his budgetary and experience shortcomings and turned them into strengths. Shot on digital video over 4 weeks for 7000 GBP, Payne frames the movie like it’s a home movie of Des’, as a wedding gift for Spider. Sometimes the story necessitates breaking from that pure home-made feel, capturing a little bit of unlikely footage, but honestly the whole feel of the movie works best being low tech.
The lads went to pubs and did ridiculous things like slapping strangers with fish out of a desire for camaraderie but also to punish/avoid conformity. Des has the hardest time coping with the idea of “selling out” (you know, going to work without a hangover or sustaining a relationship with a woman), but all of them have a jolly disdain for the grey-faced Britons they see who aren’t living the high life as they are. It’s a suspended adolescence that is bound to burn itself out, but Spider’s defection into the world of marriage is too much for Des to handle.
Maybe the movie is a belated apology on the part of Payne (who dedicated it to the Ferens Old Boys Association) for being someone’s Des at one time, or maybe he is still Des but doesn’t want to admit it. The credits do show a drunken lack of attention to detail or completion and the pacing is a little sodden, but the overall feel is that of Des dragging his feet, avoiding admitting the appeal of the lifestyle he has mocked for so long.
It’s billed as a comedy, and it’s very short, but it feels longer than its 88 minutes. The idea of growing up being so terrifying is a serious one, and the events in the film that make you laugh are only incidental, like in a real home movie; as long as you go in expecting something other than Serkis and Cohen yukking it up in a pub, I think you will be satisfied. It’s hard to say, scene by scene, whether the movie is taking the side of Des or of Spider, but I respect that it lets you just follow along this little slice of these guys’ lives as their relationships change faster than they can cope. On one side, it is a little misogynistic, since every man appears to be for the worse for having his woman, and of course marriage to a woman ends the utopian ideal of getting plastered four nights a week and hitting strangers with heavy dead fish. Then again, the boys themselves aren’t exactly clear on what it is they are really giving up, they just know it’s important to them. So obtaining a good woman also means growing up and not being a prat, and ultimately, this is a positive change in a man’s life.
MPAA Rating Not rated - R-level language and sexual situations
Release date 3/7/06
Time in minutes 88
Director Christopher Payne
Studio Spirit Level
