I was really looking forward to the Hail, Cæsar!. The trailer looked fun, and promised a movie with the same humour as The Big Lebowsky. It was running in the cinema complex close to our home, so we went to see it. The room was pretty empty for a Friday evening showing and we soon understood why: the movie is boring.

I often listener to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review. I did not year hear Hail, Cæsar’s critique (I’m listening to the podcast, and quite late), but I like one benchmark Kermode uses for comedies, the three laugh test. I got a few chuckles from this one.

Graphically, the movie is gorgeous, and you really feel a fascination and a love for this era of history of cinema. Somehow the movie reminded me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit – an homage to the history of cinema, and a movie that does not know what it is.

Up until the break, I was expecting the movie to really start, but that never happened. The big Lebowsky was pretty slow, which makes sense when you are following the life of the Dude, this movie is slower and depicts the guy who is supposed to be super busy. The whole movie is supposed to cover a bit more than a day, it felt like weeks.

This is particularly surprising because the actors are good (I loved George Clooney), there certainly plenty of fun potential in peplum movies and clearly this production had a big budget, but maybe this is the problem: big budget comedies are usually not funny.