Film critics tend to get a little punchy by midsummer.
Who wouldn’t feel the stress of sitting through one overblown special effects kiddie picture after another?
The late July/early August madness of professional movie watchers is the only explanation for the mostly rave reviews for “In the Loop,” a rather toothless British satire — a leftover from the Bush II/Blair era — that some critics have been comparing with “Dr. Strangelove.”
There are a few lively performances in the movie — James Gandolfini (above) is always fun to watch and he’s good here as an angry military man — but “In the Loop” is nothing more than a feature-length expansion of a British TV series called “The Thick of It” about a ranting Scottish politco named Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi).
The movie is more about the personal lives of government people on both sides of the Atlantic than the excesses of the real power brokers in London and Washington, D.C. Clearly worried about the end of Bush/Blair, writer-director Armando Iannucci has cooked up a generic contemporary plot about the eagerness of desk-bound politicians and generals to launch wars in foreign countries.
During much of “In the Loop” I felt like I was watching a David Mamet rewrite of “The West Wing” — a glossy soap with F-bombs going off in every other line of dialogue.
The Capaldi character overuses profanity to the point where we stop taking him seriously — would a Brit media pro really storm around Washington verbally assaulting everyone the way the Malcolm Tucker character does? Apparently, this guy doesn’t realize that his antics would be recorded by camera phones all over D.C. and end up on every wonky Website in the U.S. within minutes.
So few smart satires reach the big screen that the 1964 Stanley Kubrick nuclear war satire “Dr. Strangelove” still pretty much stands alone. It took real guts for Kubrick and Columbia Pictures to put out a black comedy about nuclear brinksmanship at the height of the cold war.
