Get Duked!

When talking about British cinema, no production house has ever reached the peaks of the sadly now-defunct Ealing Studios. Between 1930 and 1959, the West London company produced dozens of films in every genre. Yet Its defining run was really the rapid-fire trio of comedies - Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore!, and Kind Hearts and Coronets - released between April and June, 1949. It's like when Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Top Secret all opened on the same weekend, a ludicrous and endlessly influential confluence of comedy that shaped film for decades. So even though Get Duked! is a slapstick, rap-fueled horror comedy about a bunch of Scottish inner-city kids being hunted in the glens by a pair of rich snobs disguised as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, you could slap a "Filmed at Ealing Studios" card at the end, and you'd know exactly what to expect.

It's probably not deliberate, but in his feature debut writer-director Ninian Doff contemporizes the cheeky humor, and inherent mistrust of authority and the upper crust that pervaded Ealing's finest. Here the broadly-painted everyman protagonists are three dunderhead school kids in trouble and mud up to the top of their pristine sneakers. There's Duncan (Gribben), a holy fool whose terrible plans have a Garth-esque kindness to them; Dean (Gordon), who's as close to the brains of the operation as imaginable; and DJ Beatroot (Juneja), their hip-hop pal who moved up from the mean streets of London. They've been stuck with Ian (Bottomley), the good lad with no friends whose mum sent him off to bolster his CV before university, and maybe even make some friends. He's the only one taking their plight seriously, or even capable of understanding which way up to hold a map. The other three are cartoonish fools, most especially dimwit Duncan, who got them all in trouble by trying to set fire to the contents of the school toilet.

Where they are is, colloquially, the middle of arse-nowhere being forced to complete the Duke of Edinburgh award. If you have no clue, that's one of those well-intentioned programs in which inner city youth are dispatched to the countryside to learn nebulous life skills. Only, in this case, dispatching is exactly what a pair of aging hunters have planned for the boys.

Loaded with both glorious low-gore horror comedy vibes and some not-so-blunt social criticism about the entitled aristocracy, Get Duked! (which played festivals last year as Boyz in the Wood fits smoothly into the grand tradition of British broad comedies. Joe Cornish added a more subtle political subtext to its more nuanced cousin, Attack the Block, but by staying tight to that Ealing tradition of silly-smart Doff gets to play with the rules, rather than act like tradition means nothing. If he'd made the same movie 50 years ago, with the lads all dragging their bellbottoms through the gorgeous countryside of the Highlands (you'll practically be able to smell the heather, courtesy of Patrick Meller's rugged cinematography), you'd have had definitive arch-scoundrel Terry-Thomas and the ever-matronly Hattie Jacques filling Izzard and Glen's wellies as the Duke and Duchess. As the bumptious and bumbling country cops, in 1970 Ronnie Corbett would be under Dickie's hat as the ambitious and oblivious Sergeant Morag, while a young Billie Connally would be lagging behind as the squeamish PC Hamish (Guthrie).

Doff honors those traditions of British comedy by making them feel fresh again. Most importantly, he still makes his four teen tossers a squad for whom to cheer. They're absolutely what the upper classes are terrified of: a bunch of weegies, mashed on psychedelic rabbit droppings, realizing that they don't have to take this shite any more. Ealing's finest would be proud.

Get Duked! is available now on Amazon Prime.