Whiskey Galore!

Towards the begin­ning of this quaint Scot­tish com­e­dy by Gillies MacK­in­non, a moth­er com­plains to her son about the ​“ungod­li­ness” of using tele­phones on the Sab­bath. ​“Moth­er,” the son pleads in response, ​“we must move with the times.” It’s a throw­away line, but it encom­pass­es the film’s event­ful down­fall, as Whiskey Galore! is a film that has not moved with the times. This unnec­es­sary remake is for­mu­la­ic and affect­ed, fail­ing to recap­ture the play­ful mis­chief embod­ied by its beloved 1949 forbear.

As with the orig­i­nal, this is a small-town com­e­dy based on Comp­ton Mackenzie’s 1947 nov­el of the same name. The sto­ry unfolds on an imag­i­nary Hebridean island dur­ing World War Two, where the community’s whisky ration has run dry. That is until a car­go ship car­ry­ing 50,000 cas­es of the stuff wash­es up on the rocks. The whisky is recov­ered and the town rejoic­es. Home Guard war­den Cap­tain Wagget (Eddie Izzard) then spends the entire film on the hunt for eccen­tric, whisky-drunk villagers.

The rolling Scot­tish hills that pro­vide the back­drop to the sto­ry and imbue it with a dash of much-need­ed colour, while cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Nigel Willough­by suc­cess­ful­ly con­jures up the per­fect can­dy-coloured island for the com­mu­ni­ty to inhab­it. There’s a com­fort and soft­ness to the aes­thet­ic as each inte­ri­or doused in a warm, nos­tal­gic glow. Yet it’s these over-sat­u­rat­ed colours and dat­ed cos­tumes that cheap­en the whole affair. The end result irre­triev­ably old-fash­ioned and all too rem­i­nis­cent of a clunky TV drama.

The film’s cen­tral char­ac­ter (and awk­ward­ly, it’s omnipresent nar­ra­tor) is post­mas­ter Macroon (Gre­gor Fish­er) who spends the major­i­ty of his time wor­ry­ing about his daugh­ters (Nao­mi Bat­trick and Ellie Kendrick) mar­ry­ing two very charm­ing men, even though there’s bla­tant­ly lit­tle cause for con­cern. The postmaster’s daugh­ters, intend­ed to be the film’s relat­able moral anchors, might just have been its redemp­tion. But these per­for­mances feel more like old-timey dress-up than any­thing more valu­able, with a lot of faux-Scot­tish rolling ​‘R’s thrown in for good measure.

On bal­ance, the mes­sage McK­in­non is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate is not unwel­come – it’s a sim­ple tale of a com­mu­ni­ty ral­ly­ing togeth­er to break the rules and resist pompous author­i­ty. He treads com­fort­able ter­ri­to­ry but, notwith­stand­ing Izzard’s best efforts, the film falls far short of ever being laugh-out-loud fun­ny. With a more charm­ing cast or less oblique sto­ry­line, Whisky Galore! might just have been a per­fect­ly decent way to spend an rainy after­noon. As it stands, the film fails to do jus­tice to its source, lack­ing the heart and human­i­ty required to jus­ti­fy bring­ing this sto­ry back to life in 2017.