TheRetroCritic

Whether you know about Alan Partridge or not, you've surely heard of Steve Coogan. Well, to give you an idea, Partridge is Coogan's Borat . He's a rude and awkwardly stuck-up talk show host/radio DJ who wears bad sweaters, lives in Norfolk, drives a Lexus and talks kinda funny. Oh, and everything he does tends to turn sour before crashing and burning in usually embarrassing turns of events. So now all you uninitiated folks are roughly up to speed: on with the review. In this big screen outing, we find the character working as a radio DJ in Norwich for a station which is undergoing a take over. When he learns that his job might be on the line, Partridge quickly jumps at the chance of saving his own ass and throws one of his colleagues under the bus. Colm Meaney's fired employee, Pat, doesn't take kindly to all that so one night he takes control of the radio station and holds several people hostage before demanding for Partridge to be his go-between with the po

Colin Firth excels once more with this new, highly lauded effort and provides us with yet another pitch-perfect, smart performance. The film itself is confident, entertaining, well made and amusing if not quite as Earth-shattering as the critics claim. Then again it's Oscar season so why wouldn't they exaggerate a tad? Truthfully, there's not much to this film. Here we have the usual template for a character study: man has problem, gets someone to solve it, problem solved. The journey is very pleasant though and there are good performances all around, especially from Firth and Rush. The film only slightly falters when it attempts to be too cute, which happens a few times and isn't completely necessary as the situation highlighted here is whimsical enough without piling on the "lols". Not much more to say about that one really: it's good, a tad forgettable and of course overrated but good. It's never quite clear what the film is trying to conve