First Take: Walk Like a Panther- the following review is scheduled for ONE FALL

SYNOPSIS:

A group of 1980s wrestlers are forced to don the lycra once last time when their beloved local pub is threatened with closure.

When you say the words ‘World of Sport’ to anyone in my neck of the woods, a good chunk of them would remember the seminal wrestling section of ITV’s weekly sporting round-up. Walk Like a Panther attempts to cash in on the legacy of the infamous 4pm slot every Saturday- and while it does have a lot of promise, unfortunately it just failed to deliver.

It’s no fault of writer/director Dan Cadan, as the pacing of the film is decent, and his script does have a lot of humour to it, but in a modern age where younger audiences haven’t seen or heard of the British wrestling glory days of the 1980s (before the rise of what was then the WWF, I do know my stuff), the humour might not hit everyone. It’s shot very well by

Niels Reedtz Johansen, and with a score from Guy Chambers alongside new music from Kasabian (with their very own Serge Pizzorno executive producing the film) and Rick Astley, the link from the 80s to the present day is sorted.

(Usually a second image or a clip would go here, but the distributor has only released the trailer- sorry about that.)

The cast are great though, with the mighty Stephen Graham leading this one with relative ease, and paired with Dave Johns (the very man who made his big screen debut in Ken Loach’s last film), Steve Furst (formerly of the ‘turn your phone off’ cinema adverts for a certain phone company), Jill Halfpenny and Stephen Tompkinson, this is a brilliant British cast who make the film worth a watch even with it’s flaws.

THE VERDICT

While it has a lot of promise, and a lot of humour aimed for audiences who grew up with World of Sport, Walk Like a Panther struggles to find it’s mark, suffering from a few botches along the way. Either way, if you want pure escapism for a few hours, it’s still worth the price of admission purely for the nostalgia.

RATING: 3/5