“Plot”
Paul Potts (James Cordon) is an overweight opera fanatic, bullied from birth by a father (the appropriately named Colm Meaney), then schoolmates then strangers for a passion alien to the steel-working community of Port Talbot. Paul however has dreams outside of his dreary job for Carphone Warehouse and, with the support of his mother (Julie Walters) and girlfriend Jules (Alexandra Roach), fights to become the world’s next opera star.
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Review
Why, just…why now? In what realm – from creative, to business to simple goddamn logic – does it make sense to spit out a biopic on Paul Potts now?
Do you remember who Paul Potts is? Probably. Like how you overhear a song on the radio and remember when you listened to the same track in the park on your Walkman 12 years ago. He’s an opera singer and won the first series of Britain’s Got Talent. He fought publically against the terrors of bullying. He was a genuinely quite inspiring person.
6 years ago.
His life was your quintessential underdog story shtick - a favourite in cinema - and One Chance marks that inevitable development. But why, in the name of all that is holy, sacred and tasty, has it come a full six years after the man and his story was even remotely publically relevant?
True, 6 years isn’t a long gap between event and then film of that event. If you’re Ghandi. That sucker had to wait nearly 40 years before being immortalized on the big screen.
Paul Potts isn’t Ghandi. And James Cordon isn’t Ben Kingsley.
But let’s move past questioning the film’s very existence, and look at the film itself.
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| Cordon serenading what he loves most. |
One Chance is the twee-est film of the year. Hands down. About Time can get down from its pedestal. If uber-chirpy, self-deprecatingly British, desperately feel-good stories are what you look for in cinema, One Chance will keep you going for the rest of the year. If not the decade. You’d be well advised to pick up some salted popcorn, as adding any more sweet on this saccharine pile is a one-stop trip to diabetes. Window kissing, a truckload of lofty proclamation, spontaneous expressions of love (and, well…everything) through song: it’s all here.
Outside of that central damaging question – ‘what’s the point?’ – One Chance does little wrong. It also does little right. It is, in fact, almost fascinatingly ordinary. Much like it’s main man once was.
As a native Welshman, it would be criminal of me to not comment on one of my homeland’s rare excursions to the big screen. And to be fair, One Chance is a pleasant cinematographic exercise. The town of Port Talbot (and it’s very famous steel works) is almost hauntingly captured, reservedly beautiful…though that may be due to the general murky rain-soaked grimness of the valleys.
Accents wise however, it’s like watching a troupe of lobotomized impersonators crawl over each other for the world’s shittest prize: the Facecramp. That sentence doesn’t make any sense, neither does Julie Walter’s character, who will happily jump from Welsh to West Country (by way of Queen’s English) with little explanation and less grace.
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Paul is annoying, there’s no doubting that. Or is that James Cordon? It’s hard to tell, but put together they’re a potent duo. Cordon also isn’t the greatest actor, working on an emotional range of blank to irked. Not that a film like One Chance needs a potential Oscar winner at its helm, but considering Paul’s general lack of character (he’s just, well, a guy) a little bit more charisma would not have felt amiss.
Talking about watery, dimensionless characters, Paul’s girlfriend Jules apparently lurks in a world comprising exclusively of dark rooms and tea. So…Wales. Their relationship is clumsily handled, broken up by sudden, unexplained narrative jumps; climaxing with a sudden ‘6 Months Later’ subtitle which, if it’s self-aware, is comedy genius. The developments and pitfalls of their relationship are ceaselessly hackneyed, they have an argument (not that you’ll ever understand why) and in literally the next scene there are wedding bells.
One Chance may not be the sort of film to take too seriously, but giving it enough credit to treat it as a film, it’s a woeful narrative failure. In an effort to jazz up the largely uninteresting Tales of Paul Potts, it simply loses any semblance of direction and purpose. Oh wait, he’s in Venice now and then…he’s depressed at home? Eh? When the hell is the Britain’s Got Talent bit coming on? (Spoilers: at the end. Obviously.)
The relationship between Paul’s mother and father is far riper for legitimate dramatic urgency and conflict, which even a film as fluffy and pointless as One Chance needs a dose of. But it’s dismissed with a casual cock joke late in the game. Presumably so we can have some more scenes of Paul being sad and/or singing because of reasons.
But then again, Once Chance isn’t necessarily bad. It’s far too airy and empty to have the capacity for bad-ness. It’s also good for a laugh here and there – Mackenzie Crook’s boss (a Rhod Gilbert impersonator by way of Captain Jack Sparrow) is a particular highlight – so that’s a thing.
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| Here it is: at the end. |
Verdict
Critiquing One Chance is like critiquing a puppy’s face: cruel and ultimately pointless. One Chance is merry fluff, best just to…leave it be.
2/5
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