Alan Partridge

The British comedian, Steve Coogan, has a voice that is like a special effect.  His velvety baritone makes him sound a bit like Orson Welles and seems too deep and resonant for his slender body with over-sized head.  Of course, it is natural that he be cast as Alan Partridge, a vain, cowardly radio personality with a mid-morning call-in show on a small market radio station in the north of England.  Coogan is apparently a TV personality in the UK and the smarmy Alan Partridge seems to have been developed as a character in a British sit-com.  The film, Alan Partidge, is a ninety minute extension of the sit-com premise into a feature film.  In the movie, Partridge and another broadcaster, the "sleepy-time" disk jockey, Farrell are threatened by the corporate acquisition of their radio station.  The thuggish corporate owner needs to fire some "dead weight" at the station, and so, Partridge betrays his friend, suggesting that management "sack" Farrell.  Farrell is fired, but, then, returns to the station with a shot gun and takes the employees, as well as the managers, hostage.  Partridge, who has gone home, is enlisted to enter the besieged radio station to negotiate with the enraged Farrell.  The film plays out a little like a low-key British version of Dog Day Afternoon -- the police are stymied by the crisis and a crowd of local supporters gathers outside the studio:  Farrell continues to broadcast incendiary, if audience-pleasing, and populist, messages over the air.  Comedies are notoriously difficult to review and too much a matter of personal taste for me to provide much of a critical assessment of this film.  Furthermore, a comedy needs to be seen with a roomful of people.  If the audience laughs a lot, the movie is a success whatever its abstract aesthetic merits; if people don't laugh then the movie is a failure.  (By way of an example, I recently saw once more a movie that consists of nothing more than thirty or forty stand-up comedians, many of them superannuated, telling a filthy joke; the film is named after the joke, a show biz legend, The Aristocrats.  When I watched the film by myself, I thought the movie was tedious and not at all funny, even a bit ugly.  A couple months ago, I saw the movie with six or seven people who enjoyed it, were half-drunk, and who laughed uproariously -- and, predictably, I thought the movie was very funny on that viewing.)  I don't think that Alan Partridge is particularly funny.  Coogan is always fascinating to watch, but his performance in this movie seemed broad and, even, a trifle tedious.  And, at 89 minutes, the film still felt too long by, at least, a half-hour.  In my view, the movie is not daring enough to be construed as a black comedy, but, also, a little too disturbing for the merry TV-style sit-com approach employed in the picture.  Everything is a predictable and the film climaxes with an absurd slapstick shoot-out that I thought was trying too hard -- desperation, always, sinks a comedy.  That said, I should note that on Rotten Tomatoes and other metacritic sites, Alan Partridge scores high -- 87% of the viewers liked the film.  And so, it may be that the movie has merits that were simply invisible to me.