Nativity Rocks! review: ear-splitting proof that Mr Poppy and politics don't mix
Dir: Debbie Isitt; Starring: Simon Lipkin, Brian Bartle, Daniel Boys, Ramin Karimloo, Rupert Turnbull, Celia Imrie, Craig Revel Horwood, Anna Chancellor, Hugh Dennis, Ruth Jones. U cert, 100 mins.
Here is a festive poke in the eye for everyone who doubted the Nativity franchise had a fourth instalment in it, not least those of us who have yet to be persuaded it even had one. Picking up the story after the events of Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey?, Nativity Rocks! returns to St Bernadette’s in Coventry, whose pupils have yet again been Shanghaied into putting on an improbably ambitious end-of-term musical production.
The children are assisted this time by Jerry Poppy (Simon Lipkin), the school’s latest live-in lunatic and the long-lost brother of their last one, Marc Wootton’s Desmond Poppy, who has suddenly had to leave for Australia on what we are told is family business.
Poppy 2.0 quickly befriends teacher Mr Johnson – played by Daniel Boys, who like Lipkin has been transferred across to the Nativity Cinematic Universe from last year’s spin-off stage show – and also finds a friend in a young Syrian boy called Doru (Brian Bartle), who at the start of the film arrives in Britain by life raft under cover of darkness, and is separated from his father (Ramin Karimloo) as the incomers frantically pile into fruit and vegetable trucks.
Yes, Nativity 2018 is weighing in on the Syrian refugee crisis, and no, it isn’t as cringeworthy as it sounds in practice: for one thing, the message of unity makes a nice change from the series’ long-running and fantastically tedious state-school-versus-public- school war of attrition.
The pint-sized elite of Oakmoor Academy are still around, showing up the St Bernadette’s oiks at auditions and so on, but both social classes share a common enemy this time: a preening impresario called Emmanuel Cavendish (Craig Revel Horwood), who forsook his Midlands roots for a glamorous life in London long ago, the dirty cad.
You may be wondering how all of this meshes together. The short answer is, it doesn’t: returning writer-director Debbie Isitt continues to confuse actual amateurishness with “let’s put the show on right here!”-style underdog gumption and pluck. (As before, the singing and songs are a very particular kind of grating that’s less "endearingly bad X Factor audition" than "do not play in close proximity to pets or livestock’")
Yet the arrival of Lipkin heralds an interesting shift in tone – his Mr Poppy plays as more of a children’s entertainer than a madman on the loose – while the migration stuff has a weight Nativity has never attempted before, though the attempt to draw a line between wars overseas and Coventry’s own within-living-memory destruction in the Blitz gets lost in the general mess.
As has been pointed out before, it is genuinely admirable that an independent film series set in recognisable, working-class, present-day Britain, has enjoyed considerable box-office success, particularly when our national film industry is in such a precarious state. But did it have to be this?
