Chicken Town review - sluggish rural comedy with few laughs (and one chicken)

Fans of the character comedian Graham Fellows will possibly turn up for this British film starring the man who created the punk parody single “Jilted John” and Sheffield’s finest, the car-coated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth. But they may leave disappointed.

The action is set in one of the backwaters of rural Britain getting a lot of attention these days; on paper the plot is serviceable. Chicken empire heir Lee Matthews (Ramy Ben Fredj, pictured below, left with Ethaniel Davy) skids on black ice and wipes out a Nativity scene outside his local church but gets the blame pinned on his best friend, Jayce (Ethaniel Davy), who does 10 months inside. When Jayce gets out, he is intent on finding the real culprit and getting revenge. Along the way he comes across Kev (Fellows), a 67-year-old retired man who is looking after a neighbour’s odd-looking indoor plants. Together they set up a medicinal marijuana deal; meanwhile, Lee’s fortunes plummet as his invalid dad has remarried, and he is out on his ear.You can imagine this material in the hands of Mike Leigh, milking all the  social embarrassments in the scenario, where Kev is a kindly fool, though unfairly derided by younger people, who mock his out-of-touchness. Guy Ritchie would have brought in outside gangs to try to steal Kev’s marijuana crop, dousing it in gore. It could have been styled as a cod-docudrama, like This Country; a gentler rural sitcom about male besties, like Detectorists; a more pointedly satirical comedy like The Change.

Sadly, writer/director Richard Bracewell and his co-writer Patrick Dalton have done little to ensure their film stands out in this crowded field. In the very first minute they deploy an intermittent annoyance, a narrator with a generic “rural” accent, whose explanatory voice-overs are intrusive and unnecessary. The dialogue should speak for itself. Except, it’s a bit too baggy for that, overstuffed with quips and one-liners. The scene in which Kev’s not very smart phone is ridiculed by two catty phone shop assistants goes on for at least two insults too many, for example. 

There is some comedic potential in the script, but, making things worse, the cast aren’t experienced enough to mine it. Only Laurence Rickard (pictured below), the wonderful neanderthal and headless courtier from Ghosts, makes any impact as the conspiracy theorist bike-shop owner (and under-the-counter gun-runner) Jayce sells his beloved motorbike to.

It falls to Fellows to try to steer this unwieldy vehicle somewhere peppier. Again, there is scope for it. Kev is a man in the same vein as John Shuttleworth, wedded to Tupperware and his chest-freezer while yearning for a new fly-mo and mystified by the young talking about “egg-boxes”, until the local yobs realise he means “X-boxes”. (Possibly the sharpest gag in the film.) One of his best moments comes when the unlikely comic material of a 1960s Buddhist monk filmed self-immolating as an anti-Vietnam War protest pays off in the last reel. 

But this is Fellows at half-speed, obliged to produce chunks of dialogue that need cutting or speeding up through snappier editing. There’s a sluggish,  overly text-bound feel to the piece, when sight gags would work better. 

There are minor mysteries throughout, mostly focused on the writers’ lack of curiosity about their own characters. Is Lee gay, as one scene seems to suggest? And his friend Paula (Amelie Davies) has a hinterland that goes mostly undeveloped, a young woman about whom the only thing you take away is that she plays online games with a girl who seems to live in South Korea.

By the denouement, the final mystery is why the writers titled their piece Chicken Town, as the only sign of the birds is the one specimen that pecks about outside Lee's caravan and the giant bucket of their assorted fried body parts that Lee at one point consumes in his car. The family business goes unexplored and unremarked upon (even though chicken manure is one of the key sources of effluent now entering Britain’s waterways). Lee’s dad is a monster, but that’s the only comment on his trade, and an oblique one at that. Ditto the fact that his fictitious family name is Matthews, long associated with oddly shaped poultry products. Deliberate? Impossible to tell.

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