Movies

Get Duked!

Catholic News Service

Wretched British comedy, set in the highlands of Scotland, in which three habitually misbehaving Glasgow teens (Viraj Juneja, Lewis Gribben and Rian Gordon) are signed up, against their will, to participate in the real-life Duke of Edinburgh’s Award program designed, in part, to expose young city dwellers to the glories of the wilderness. Joined by a strait-laced fellow student (Samuel Bottomley) intent on taking the experience seriously, they set out for a two-day hiking expedition. But they suddenly find themselves being hunted through the glens by a rifle-toting aristocrat (Eddie Izzard) and his sword-wielding wife (Georgie Glen). A running joke about the hallucinatory effects of eating rabbit droppings typifies the sophomoric quality of the humor in writer-director Ninian Doff’s rambling stupidity fest, which pauses briefly to salute the bond that develops among the quartet of outsiders and to decry the U.K.’s class system.

 

Watch out for: Violent incidents, gory images played for laughs, benignly viewed drug use and underage drinking, much scatological humor, a few mild oaths, pervasive rough and crude language, obscene gestures.

 

Rated: L, limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling; MPAA: R

 

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