In the annals of historical biopics, Jonathan Teplitzsky’s “Churchill” stands out as a uniquely awful and tedious caricature of a fascinating subject. The film, which imagines British prime minister Winston S. Churchill as wracked with misgivings and opposing the Allied Forces’ D-Day invasion until the very last minute, strikes this reviewer as a load of utter rubbish from first frame to last.
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That the D-Day invasion could have gotten off the ground—much less succeeded—with this kind of last-minute schoolboy squabbling at the top is worthy of a Monty Python send-up, not a movie that wants to be taken seriously.
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The tale reaches a pinnacle of ludicrousness in a scene that suggests a grade-school parody of King Lear. After the invasion is delayed for a day due to bad weather, Churchill goes into his bedroom, gets on his knees, whirls his arms, and prays for
more bad weather. “Please, please, please let pour tomorrow!” he bellows. “Let the sea churn in peaks and troughs and tidal waves!”
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Actually, von Tunzelmann’s script has one aspect of genuine value: it could be taught in schools as an example of the mistakes that can be made in screenwriting, from the terrible dialogue and hackneyed characters to the trashing of interesting history.
Andrew Roberts, a prominent Churchill historian, wrote, “The only problem with the movie … is that it gets absolutely everything wrong. Never in the course of movie-making have so many specious errors been made in so long a movie by so few writers.”
It really is that bad.