Holly_OHara

Of course the ubiquitous Paul Britton rocks up in this, telling us how he was the one who informed the police that there would be more than two bodies under the patio of 25 Cromwell Street. It's funny, because no other material on the Wests credits him with that perceptive statement.

What really bothers me about this series is the re-enactments. Rose's younger versions still look like the frumpy housewife she is most associated with after her arrest, rather than teenager she was at the time of meeting Fred and being stepmum to Charmaine and Anne-Marie. As for Charmaine, the girl who plays her is white! Even the photo of the real Charmaine is heavily filtered, erasing her Asian heritage. Really poor decision from the producers.

As another reviewer says, there is nothing that this show adds to the genre. It's a lot of very well educated people who should know better, sitting around congratulating themselves on their superior understanding of the human psyche.

Clearly I am in the minority here as so many others seem to have adored this and I will admit that the animation is, of course, visually stunning. This is nothing less than we have come to expect from Aardman. The story - about fitting in and finding one's place in the world - falls flat to me. There is not enough to really invoke empathy with Robin's plight at the beginning. Instead, she is just clumsy and there is a limit to the hilarity of knocking over glasses and causing chaos. In fact, none of the characters really draw you in. We don't see enough of the mouse family to care about them, the magpie was just weird and the cat was, predictably, an evil predator that also inexplicably understood Robin's motivation and used this against her to crush her spirit. The film somehow smacks you in the face with its message while still failing to land its punch.

The songs, such as they were, did not really justify calling this a musical and you'll struggle to remember any of them past the end credits. I was just bored with the whole thing and by the halfway point, I couldn't wait to get to the end (I was watching with others or I suspect I would have given up).

As I said, almost everyone else seems to think this is the next Christmas classic and I'm glad they got that level of enjoyment from it, but it's been taken off my watchlist and won't be a Christmas staple for me.

Appallingly cynical marketing attempt to play on fans' loyalty and eagerness for an actual reunion. I went with my partner, who is the actual Friends fan in the relationship, and he was massively apologetic when it became increasingly apparent that we were just going to watch episode after episode of a series we could just stay at home to watch, for FREE!

I couldn't even understand the episode choices - episode 1 was the only obvious pick, but everything else just seemed randomly selected from series one. This "movie" is nothing but a rip off and Warner Brothers should be utterly ashamed of themselves.