Search - The Final Programme on DVD

"Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean!"

Laon | moon-lit Surry Hills | 11/06/2001

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? Well, I'm going to, a bit. The fact is, this really isn't a very good film. Despite the inventiveness at the set design level, and despite the great shirts worn by Jon Finch, this film is surprisingly subdued at an ideas level. The free-wheeling political, sexual and chemical anarchism of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius character is largely absent. So is altogether too much of Moorcock's plot; director Robert Fuest obviously hadn't read the book with, shall we say, a clear head, and neither had his scriptwriter. Instead of Moorcock's plot (actually the first Elric novel re-staged in the acid-glow London of an alternative universe) we get something that mostly looks like a mildly futuristic secret agent film, with a familiar enough "swinging London" as a backdrop. But despite these trappings we never exactly get a secret agent plot, either. Though I think the reviewers who compared Jon Finch's Jerry Cornelius to Mike Myers' Austin Powers, psychedelic spy, are exactly right. But the resemblance is surely no coincidence. Mike Myers has almost certainly seen this film more than thrice, and the fifth time he was taking notes. Though the Austin Powers films actually make more sense than Fuest's film, and god knows that's not saying much. _The Final Program_ more or less works as a cult film of an interesting cult book. But the trouble with cult films is that unless they're very, very good they tend to fall into being very dull instead. There's only so long you can say, "But the plot isn't _supposed_ to make sense," and "But they're _deliberately_ acting like that", and "yes, but it being shambolic is part of the _point_", and so on, before starting to rebel. Maybe, one suspects, it seems to be not very good because it's not very good. The early Jerry Cornelius stories and the first novel are themselves mostly a sort of in-joke, but there are plenty of incidental pleasures along the way in Moorcock's writing. But the film is an in-joke without enough out-jokes (the biggest laugh isn't for anything contributed by the scriptwriter, but when Finch's Cornelius quotes Monty Python: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition"). It's not so much shambolic, in the end, as sham bollocks. Still, though it was a disappointment to Moorcock fans, and probably everyone who saw it (I first saw it at the art-house cinema in Mission Bay, the disgusted manager leading me into a vast theatre where I had the company of only seven other patrons; and of only three other patrons by the time it had finished), it's a curiosity, and it has some residual charms. Finch's performance is one source of charm; his big shirts are another. Some of Fuest's set designs are terrific, such as his version of Moorcock's mythical club "The Friendly Bum" (Fuest was really more of a designer than a director). And occasional Moorcock gems survived the addled scripting: Jerry's ultimatum to his evil brother Frank, "Throw down your needle and come out with your veins clean" is one of cinema's great lines, that belonged in a better film. So... it never quite works, and it cheapens too many of Moorcock's ideas. Especially the end, when Moorcock's climactic merging of his male and female characters to create a new androgyne, beautiful and deadly, is replaced in Fuest's film with the creation of a, well, a man in an apesuit. Moorcock makes a point about gender; Fuest gives us instead a puzzling and irrelevant visual joke. But for all these defects and disappointments it's an original film, odd, visually interesting, and not without charm. I can't in all honesty give it a very high rating, and yet I took the trouble to see it three times in cinemas, being prepared to cross town on a rainy night to catch a screening, or infuriate girlfriends by taking them to this instead of something decent (I have never met a woman who has seen this film and liked it). It's a film that seems to shimmer with the ghosts of ideas that never quite make it onto the screen; it clearly comes from a strange place. And for all its faults, including some dull patches, there's that charm thing. Somehow, it's got charm. But rent it first: Taste and try, as Frank might say, before you buy."