21 October 2024

The Franchise is a sharp send-up of superhero films

Richard E Grant is glorious in this Rolls-Royce production from Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes.

There are two truly funny characters in The Franchise, a comedy about the making of a rubbish superhero film called Tecto: Eye of the Storm, and both of them (surprise!) are actors. The first (minor) is Rufus Maley (Justin Edwards), who’s been cast as Mollusc Man in the awful movie. Thanks to his body suit, going for a pee necessitates expensive set breaks, which is how he comes to be wearing a nappy; its super absorbency will save the production £300. Luckily, Maley isn’t proud. “Happy to nappy!” he says. And: “I’m big, it’s the nappies that got small.” At home time, he elects not to swap it for a clean pair of boxers. He’s got a long drive ahead.

The second (major) is Peter (Richard E Grant), the old luvvie of a supporting actor who’s playing a figure known as Eye. His make-up and immoderately hackneyed costume, a Ming the Merciless purple frock coat, make him look like Zandra Rhodes, but he wears both with a touch of amour propre nonetheless, dreaming of Lear. When he opens his mouth, out pours the invective, pure rancid Coward, and it’s kind of glorious.

“I’m just standing here, watching you jack off,” he says to Adam (Billy Magnussen), who’s playing Tecto and fears being replaced by Kit Harrington or “one of the Skarsgaards” (Tecto’s superpowers are invested in an invisible jackhammer, the use of which makes him look like he’s vigorously fondling himself). As the titles roll at the end of the second episode, Peter is giving an interview, during which he monologues about an ape he once worked with, Bong-Bong (“dear old Bong-Bong”). This made me honk to a degree that was quite embarrassing, for all that I was alone in the house.

Elsewhere, though, cleverness perhaps impedes full hilarity. This is a Rolls-Royce production: Armando Iannucci produces, Sam Mendes (whose idea it was originally) directs the first episode, and the script is by Jon Brown (Succession). It’s fast, knowing and somewhat self-conscious in the same way that, say, the BBC spoof W1A was all of these things; the audience’s enjoyment is predicated on how much it’s prepared to tolerate insider jokes.

I smiled whenever sci-fi figures in outlandish costumes casually walked to the canteen across the studio car park. But all the assistant director talk left me a bit cold, and when it comes to neurotic stars like Adam, Extras got there first (Daniel, the first assistant director played by Himesh Patel, has to reassure Jack that his jackhammer, which is “made of sound waves”, is far cooler than the “stick of maximum potency” that has been given to a female character).

The show sends up the increasingly small returns involved in superhero franchises, their horrendous excesses, and the threat they present to cinema. If studio bosses are obsessed with merchandise and the reactions of fans, directors are clueless and pretentious auteurs who have been signed up for their prestige, and will promptly be sacked when it’s time to rescue the picture commercially. Tecto’s German director Eric (Daniel Brühl) is committed to “saying something about fracking”. He wants hundreds of extras dressed as Moss Men (a new budget-cutting producer allows him five, and CGI will do the rest). His notes to actors (“swaggering, but anxious, like a panther on its way to a job interview”) are hopeless, but also go unquestioned by the vain, the stupid, and the egomaniacal.

Chaos is only ever a trailer away. Pat Shannon (Darren Goldstein) arrives from the studio, swinging his you-know-what (no, I mean the bulging taco he has picked up from catering). His bombshell is that the “Fish People” were on the receiving end of a late and unexpected genocide in the preceding picture in the franchise, which means they cannot appear in this film. Personally, I hope the Fish Men don’t disappear because I like the over-sensitive extra who keeps complaining about his costumes (“this isn’t very breathable,” he says, through tight expanses of green lycra dotted with the odd yellow ping-pong ball). He wants to know whether, if the Fish Men are indeed massacred, he and the others will still get their per diem – a line that freelances everywhere will find bleakly funny whether they work in the movies or not.