If your film is a biopic about the greatest comedy double-act of all time, you need a persuasive reason for saddling it with a downbeat tone. Sadly, Stan & Ollie lacks one. Steve Coogan and John C Reilly disappear into their roles — Coogan’s voice is a faultless, almost unnerving recreation of Laurel’s that few actors could have achieved — but they lack the onscreen magnetism of the originals, which is the reason anyone would be interested in seeing this in the first place.
Focusing inexplicably on a period in which their star was on a downward trajectory, there isn’t enough drama in their off-screen relationship — which seems to have been defined by mutual love and compatibility rather than conflict — to justify this choice. Whereas you may wish to see how gems like The Music Box or Way Out West were created, what you get here is stage-bound echoes of their Hollywood heyday, bickering wives, smarmy impresarios, and some painfully concrete dialogue (“You just never stop, do you?” asks Ollie of Stan, in case it hadn’t occurred to you that he might have been be quick-witted) — as well as occasional touches of pure schmalz.
Having no obvious alternative, the principals fall back on the conceit that Laurel and Hardy’s real-life characters shared much with their onscreen personas — but it looks like what it likely is: that they are trying desperately to conjure up something, in the absence of any lustre to the script, by mimicking moments of comic genius that resulted from a once-in-a-lifetime-or-two pairing of actors. Minor character quirks like (in Oliver Hardy’s case) gambling or (in Stan Laurel’s) a tendency to tell white lies don’t justify any compelling interest in them as individuals — and, if the screenwriter’s point here is that you can be absolutely brilliant but still make bad romantic choices, we get it.
FATAL VISIONS 