Cert PG Running time 92mins ★★★
After ruling the children’s book charts for over 20 years and dominating TV schedules for a decade, the Horrible Histories team have set their sights on conquering the big screen with this amiable lightweight romp around Roman Britain.
It’s enjoyable enough and sticks closely to a strategy which has served them so well in a lengthy campaign to subjugate the nation’s schoolchildren to the Horrible Histories super-successful brand of historical facts, bodily fluid jokes and knockabout songs.
Sebastian Croft and Emilia Jones are the pleasant and fresh-faced leads, with Croft playing a Roman teen sent to Britain as punishment who is then captured by Jones’s feisty Celtic wannabe warrior.
Well-known faces such as Nick Frost and Lee Mack pop up, although the bigger names such as Warwick Davis and Derek Jacobi have only cameo appearances.
Liverpool-born actress Kim Cattrall adds a touch of class as Emperor Nero’s mother, and is game for a laugh.
And while her absence from the big screen has been a loss for us all, at least this is closer to reality and a lot more fun than 2010’s Sex and the City 2.
Considering the long-lasting impact the gadabout and bloodthirsty Romans had on Britain, and of which we have exhaustive knowledge, this movie is never horrible or historical enough.
It feels as if a TV episode’s-worth of material has been stretched to fill the movie’s length, with the script failing to up its game to compensate for the lack of a Hollywood budget.
With crushing inevitability, the best gag is a riff on Kirk Douglas’s Roman gladiator classic Spartacus, and with the rest of the jokes relying heavily on a mix of music and teenage hormones, quality-wise this feels more like a kid-friendly Carry On Cleo.
Or it could possibly be retitled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sixth Forum.
