First Take: Greatest Days - take that back to the writers’ room and don’t do it like this

SYNOPSIS: A feature adaptation of the ‘The Band’ musical, featuring the songs of Take That.

Well, of all the ideas for films, Amazon had to plough some money into a little indie film based on Tim Firth and Take That’s musical which premiered a couple of years ago. Obviously it was only really gonna do well here in the UK for very understandable reasons, but the fact that there’s been no press kit and only a trailer should’ve been sounding the alarm bells. It’s not good. At all.

Coky Giedroyc directs this one (the Giedroycs seem to have a lot of involvement with this musical, as her younger sister Mel helped cast the original musical via BBC show Let It Shine), and while she’s still fairly new to directing at feature length, her experience working on TV shows came in handy, because at 1 hour 52 minutes, it does feel more like an extended TV special than a film made for the big screen. Firth’s script has some serious issues too, one minute we’re seeing that group of friends during the peak of Take That - or to give them their name in the film, The Boys’ popularity, the next, we get emotional moments, then back to the joy of the reunion - it is so disjointed that you could tell it was literally just the book from the show but adapted for the big screen. It’s shot decently by Mike Eley, and Nick Foster and Oli Julian’s score is alright - but don’t get me started on the obvious product placement for Easyjet, that apparently isn’t product placement because they loaned that aircraft free of charge as it was being refurbished. Would it be a birthday marathon film review without at least one rant?

On to the cast then, and Aisling Bea carries this film single handedly, partly as she was a script consultant herself - supporting her is Alice Lowe, Amaka Omafor, Jayde Adams and Marc Wooton. Then you have a boyband who *look like* the actual band this film is about, but don’t sound, or act like the actual band. And speaking of the real deal, would it be a musical biopic without a cameo from the actual subjects? Yes, Gary Barlow, Howard Donald and Mark Owen do appear briefly in a cameo, but aside from that, there aren’t too many good things to report. It’s had its cinema run, it’ll be on Prime fairly soon, and it’ll probably have more success on a streamer compared to on the big screen - the most interesting thing about my screening was a projector issue just before the film started. Yes, really.

THE VERDICT

There was some serious potential for Greatest Days - if rumours are true this was initially going to be a Hollywood film with Rebel Wilson being involved - but the studios said no. And to be honest, if that happened, why did they push on and make this thing regardless? At least the songs are actually good though.

RATING: 2/5