Oh come on chaps, you can do – have done – so much better than this. Steve Coogan stars, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with Foley directing. Covetable comic talents have set themselves not to invent but to replicate. What a waste of imagination.
Opening less than 18 months after the Cuban missile crisis, the 1964 satire was motored by charismatic alarm. Its vision of a bloke (there is no she anywhere near power) getting his hands on the nuclear bomb and going off his trolley offered wisecracks and warning, tremendous quasi-documentary footage of aircraft and war rooms, looming, grainy, flashlit faces. Plus, of course, a triple dose of an eyebrow waggling Peter Sellers, as American president, twitching British airforce officer and bonkers scientist.
