The Edinburgh film festival kicked off with Tommy’s Honour, a gently old-fashioned yarn about a 19th-century Scottish golf champion that may have induced mild stirrings of patriotism. Now the festival is aiming to repeat the trick with a remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s fondly remembered 1949 Ealing comedy Whisky Galore!, an adaptation of Compton Mackenzie’s novel that itself drew on real events.
Like the original, it sets out to be a celebration of canny Scots outwitting humourless (and partly English) officialdom: a ship runs aground on a fictional Hebridean island during the second world war and the locals do their best to liberate some of the thousands of whisky bottles in its cargo. Cue cat-and-mouse shenanigans as the home guard try to reinforce wartime discipline and prevent imbibement above and beyond the quota level. Two weddings are simultaneously planned, involving the daughters of the leading whisky filcher.
In Mackendrick’s hands, this story was a charming tale of defying the ration and indulging in a little acceptable law-breaking – both modish subjects in the immediate postwar period. In 2016, however, its purpose is much harder to understand: it comes across as twee, comfy-cardigan film-making. And, Eddie Izzard’s best efforts notwithstanding, it simply isn’t very funny.
It’s a pity, since director Gillies MacKinnon has done a lot of good work in the past, including the Glasgow gang film Small Faces and a fine adaptation of Regeneration. He has also made a decent wartime yarn with Izzard before, a BBC drama called Castles in the Sky, about the invention of radar. But it all seems a bit flat here: without the crackle and energy of the Ealing films, there isn’t much inspiration on view. As the Coen brothers learned with their hamfisted attempt at remaking The Ladykillers, you mess with Ealing at your peril.
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