Deborah Ross is so NOT excited by Almodovar

I was so excited about I’m So Excited but now I am just so disappointed. I love Pedro Almodóvar, usually. I would be his bitch any day, I’d have said, and although I’d probably still be his bitch, because you can’t hold one film against a person when they’ve made so many terrific ones, I may not be quite so wholehearted now I’ve been sold a pup. I thought this was going to be a ‘fun, screwball comedy’. I thought it was Almodóvar returning to his ‘wild comedy roots’. But it’s thin, banal, boring, unwitty and, if satirical, then poorly satirical, and poorly satire is no good to anyone. It won’t even put the kettle on. (Put the kettle on. ‘No. I’m poorly.’)

The film is almost entirely set on an aeroplane, on a Peninsula Airways flight from Madrid to Mexico, which, once airborne, is discovered to have a landing-gear fault. This means it has to circle and circle and circle until a runway capable of accommodating such an emergency is found. The plane is staffed by three gayer-than-gay male flight attendants, all closely fitting the John Inman or Larry Grayson stereotype — or Spanish equivalent — which seems rather lazy, and two boozy pilots who may be straight, may be gay, may be both. They are trying to work that out for themselves. Anyway, the economy passengers dealt with — they are all drugged to sleep, which seems wise for all concerned — the stewards set about entertaining and distracting the business-class passengers, who include a professional dominatrix, a hitman, a beautiful just married couple, a psychic who is also a virgin, a womanising soap star and an embezzling banker who is fleeing arrest.

The stewards sing for them — their lip-synch version of The Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’ is quite fun, I suppose — and ply them with tequila and then mescaline, an hallucinatory drug similar to LSD, if you don’t know.