Essentially an expansion of his “The Trews” (“true-news”, geddit?) YouTube series, Russell Brand’s sub-Michael Moore polemic finds the comedian-turned-activist failing to gain megaphone-waving access to the headquarters of major banks, with sporadically entertaining results. His bullet points are simple, nay simplistic – wealth inequality is bad, tax-dodging sucks, and you’re more likely to go to jail for small-scale benefit fraud than the wholesale pillaging of the economy. Highlights include Brand turning up at the house of “non-dom” Lord Rothermere and establishing that he does appear to “dom” here after all. Low points include Brand indulging in the kind of luvverly chummy man-of-the-people shtick that is the stock in trade of the very politicians he dismisses. A group of lively schoolkids are enlisted to help illustrate the unfair distribution of wealth in a sequence that nails the film’s classroom tone.
