DIRECTORS: Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft
CAST: James Purefoy, Joshua McGuire, Ramon Tikaram, Richard Harrington, David Hayman, Maggie Steed, Fiona Button, Dave Johns, Sam Swainsbury, Jade Anouka, Chris Evans, Meadow Nobrega, Rory Wilton, Corinne Furman, Imelda May, Levi Roots, Libby Walker, Mae Voogd, Fode Simbo, Greg McKenzie, Jim Main, Morgan Val Baker
RUNNING TIME: 111 mins
CERTIFICATE: 12A
BASICALLY…: The Cornish sea shanty group Fisherman’s Friends reach new levels of fame…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
There can’t help but feel to be a slight missed opportunity with Fisherman’s Friends: One and All, even before you factor in all its other flaws (of which, it has to be said, there are quite a few). Given the sudden demand for sea shanties over the last year or so, with Nathan Evans’ rendition of “Wellerman” making waves both on TikTok and in the official music charts, you’d think that more would have been done to spice up the appeal in a film about musicians who exclusively sing such tunes (or, at the very least, a small role for Evans himself as an appreciative gesture for his own success). No such luck, unfortunately, for while the sequel to the hit 2019 film – itself a fictionalised take on the career of the real-life titular sea shanty group – attempts to duplicate that first film’s harmless appeal, its noticeable lack of drive makes it more of a damp squid this time round.
Fisherman’s Friends: One and All picks up a year after the group of Cornish fishermen has found chart success following their signing by Universal Music Group, the same record label that houses Lady Gaga among many other famous artists. The group, fronted by their lead man Jim (James Purefoy), is struggling with their newfound fame, including the endless touring, unwanted public attention, and the pressure to produce a worthy second album, but it is Jim – who is still in rough shape after the death of his father (David Hayman, seen here as a ghostly presence) – who is finding it the most difficult, descending further into alcoholism and depression, and eventually becoming such a curmudgeon that the band’s future is put at risk.
That’s just one of the plot strands, though, as One and All fills itself with subplot after subplot to try and fill its near two-hour running time: among them, there’s a budding romance with a disgraced singer (played by Irish musician Imelda May in her acting debut), a media training course to deal with the group’s political incorrectness, the hiring of new band member Morgan (Richard Harrington) who’s – gasp! – not Cornish but Welsh, and – double gasp! – a farmer instead of a fisherman, and eventually the group’s real-life performance at Glastonbury. Somehow, though, despite so much appearing to happen all at once, you never quite feel that anything actually does happen in this movie. Many of the conflicts – if you can even call them that at all – are resolved very fast, and often without much effort from any of the characters since things just conveniently fall into place for them anyway. Some don’t even end up going anywhere, or far enough to where they affect the direction of the overall movie. It feels like one of those sequels that’s comprised of material for episodes of a rejected television series, put into one blender and then tidied up to give itself the appearance of a feature-length film, a bit like what The Secret Life of Pets 2 and most direct-to-video Disney sequels ended up being. The movie ends up feeling just as unambitious as those other examples, which somewhat undermines the integrity of the real-life band who inspired it.
I vaguely remember saying the same thing about the first movie, which I personally wasn’t that big a fan of, but that one did at least feel like a movie; it certainly stuck to a formula, for better or worse (mostly worse), but it did have much more of a solid plot and even a reason for being, and did have such a sense of wholesomeness to it that I honestly wasn’t that surprised when it became an unexpected box office hit over here. This one, though, feels like it was made out of pure obligation, as though the filmmakers didn’t expect it to take off with audiences and as such had no idea what to do with the demanded follow-up. It tries so hard to pander towards general audiences, particularly the middle-aged and older variety, with pretty sunset shots of the Cornish coast and condescending monologues about the proper way to prepare a scone, that not only does it feel manipulative (especially in later scenes where the emotion is turned up to unbearable levels), but also much emptier and even shallower than a movie about an actual feel-good sea shanty band ought to be.
It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that most of the Fisherman’s Friends band members within the film aren’t even characters in this movie; unless you’re played by James Purefoy, I, Daniel Blake’s Dave Johns or the slightly younger Sam Swainsbury who is there to appeal to more youthful audiences, you are basically an extra in a film that is named after your own band. Amazingly, there are now two films about the Fisherman’s Friends band, and the amount that you get to know of them throughout both, you can’t even count beyond one hand. I can’t imagine being a member of the actual band and seeing your own contributions toward the group’s success being completely shoved into the sea to make room for soapy storylines involving fictionalised version of select others, some of whom – particularly Purefoy’s Jim – are written to be so aggravatingly miserable most of the time that you start to wonder why everyone else puts up with them, to a certain point. Instead, both movies, especially One and All, cater more to audiences who want overly inoffensive and unchallenging material to spend a couple of hours watching, instead of truly embracing the universality of this real-life band and their genuinely charming work that still, even to this day with the success of Nathan Evans, carries on the timeless legacy of sea shanties.
I am a bit worried now, because the producers behind the Fisherman’s Friends movies are also developing a film about Captain Sir Tom Moore. Hopefully, with that eventual movie, they’ll at least give their subject matter a bit more dignity and universality than they managed with the Fisherman’s Friends.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Fisherman’s Friends: One and All is an unambitious and entirely obligatory sequel that pads itself out with thin storylines that either go nowhere or have few vital consequences, leaving it an emptier and more condescending film than even the first formula-ridden one, and doesn’t even have the decency to have the fictionalised members of the titular band feel like actual characters in their own movie.
