Moore Not Less - Spice World & Boat Trip

1997's Spice World is a gruesome 90s relic designed to cash in on the short lived but lucrative Spice Girls phenomenon. The Spice Girls (an all girl pop group) were sort of like the One Direction of their day and Spice World is an attempt to give them A Hard Day's Night type of vehicle. A tongue-in-cheek day in the life. I'm not sure if the Spice Girls are still threatening reunion tours and comebacks these days. They seem to have gone their separate ways. Prolific BBC sitcom director Bob Spiers (Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, Bottom) was hired to direct Spice World. Spiers had never heard of The Spice Girls when he was asked to direct this film and it appears that Roger Moore was in the same boat. According To Roger's autobiography he met the Spice Girls for the first time during the Channel 5 launch and made a vague promise to be in the film they said they were making. When he was later asked to join the production for one day to film a cameo he was pleasantly surprised to see how generous the fee was and agreed immediately.

The Spice Girls themselves include Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham) - though why she's called Posh Spice I don't know. I think her dad was a rich businessman so that might explain it. Victoria became best known for marrying the footballer David Beckham. Ginger Spice (Geri Halliwell) is, as the name suggests, the ginger one. She was best known for wearing Union Jack dresses. The 1990s was clearly a much simpler time. If you wore a Union Jack dress today you'd probably be cancelled and accused of fascism or something. Sporty Spice is Melanie Chisholm. She's called Sporty Spice because she does backflips and enjoys watching snooker. Melanie C seems to be the best singer out of the bunch from what I can tell. Baby Spice (Emma Bunton) is the blonde one. She's called Baby because she's the youngest. She played up on this with childlike dresses and pigtails. Last but not least we have Scary Spice (Mel B). Scary Spice gets her name because she seems to be the loudest and most extrovert one and also because she looks like she could easily take the other Spice Girls in a no holds barred cage fight with ladders.

Spice World, awash with billions of cameos (even Michael Barrymore manages to get his mug in here), was a box-office hit but met with a poor critical reception (it has an abysmal 3.7 on IMDB and I can't say I have any major disagreement with that evaluation). The film now resides in a dusty forgotten time capsule along with Cool Britannia and Tony Blair's popularity. The premise of the film has The Spice Girls preparing for a big concert at the Royal Albert Hall. That's about it as far as story goes. They misbehave with their fusspot manager Clifford (Richard E Grant) trying to keep them under control, try to visit pregnant friend Nichola (Naoko Mori), sing some songs, and ride around in a Double Decker bus driven by Meatloaf. Barry Humphries as a sleazy tabloid mogul, Richard O'Brien as a photographer, and Alan Cumming as a documentary filmmaker all pester them.

There are cameos by Jools Holland, Bob Geldof, Bob Hoskins, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and about a million other people I've forgotten. Jonathan Ross inevitably manages to blag a cameo. George Wendt (better known as Norm from Cheers) turns up at one point. Elton John has a cameo as himself. All of it is dire. The Spice Girls can't act, the script and film is unfunny, the direction is flat, the cameos are gratuitous and embarrassing. It's awful. This is one of those films that you have to watch in small doses and then take a break. It is nigh on unwatchable and impossible to get through in one sitting. Spice World is palpably slapdash and desperate and one has the impression that everyone involved knows this is a load of rubbish. They also knew though that anything involving the Spice Girls was going to make them bags of money so you could describe this film as quite a cynical exercise if you were being, er, cynical. I'd imagine that eight year-old Spice Girl fanatics might have got a kick out of this film in 1997 but it's hard to see why anyone would watch it today.

So what of Roger? Roger makes a brief appearance as the mysterious boss of the record company. He sits in a chair and strokes a white cat (just to remind us he used to be James Bond) and has a brief telephone conversation with Richard E Grant as the manager. Talk about easy money! Rog didn't even have to stand up. The CV of Sir Roger is in no way enhanced by his participation in this fiasco but look on the bright side. At least he's only in it for a fleeting appearance and got well paid for his time. Imagine how Richard E Grant must have felt. He was in Withnail & I a decade before and is now playing straight man to The Spice Girls for a whole film! Spice World is not even worth the effort for Roger's blink and you'll miss him appearance. Watch A Hard Day's Night or the cult The Monkees film Head instead to see how a musical film like this should really be done.



Boat Trip was written by Harold Pinter and adapted from his stage play of the same name. I'm only kidding. Boat Trip was directed and co-written by Mort Nathan, who made his named on the fondly remembered sitcom The Golden Girls with Bea Arthur. Nathan followed up Boat Trip by directing something called Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj so, with respect, he's not exactly Billy Wilder. Boat Trip has a rating of 7% on Rotten Tomatoes and having viewed the film I'd say 7% is very generous. Boat Trip is another twilight Rog glorified cameo picture although his role here amounts to a trifle more than Spice World. The film is essentially a vehicle for Cuba Gooding Jr, who won an Academy Award for Jerry Maguire in 1996. Sadly for Cuba, he seemed to go from the Oscars to Golden Raspberries in no time at all in this era and Boat Trip seemed to be symbolic of his rapid plunge into stupid comedy films.

Boat Trip is a one joke film and here is the joke. Jerry (Cuba Gooding Jr) and friend Nick (Horatio Sanz) are down in the dumps and decide to book themselves a European cruise in order to meet women. But when they insult a travel agent's colleague he gains his revenge by booking them on a gay cruise. The pair only realise this when they are on the ship. Oh, and some Swedish bikini models have to be rescued along the way. Cue some bawdy shenanigans - including Roger as an old queen named Lloyd Faversham...

This is a forgettable comedy that probably isn't memorable enough to be offensive although it deals with stereotypes with little sense of tact or self-knowledge. I doubt this film could be made today. No one on the cruise is normal and every cliche you might expect will be dredged up. Gooding Jr and Horatio Sanz do their best but neither are especially funny. Sanz seems to have the type of part that the late Chris Farley would have played. Boat Trip seems at times to be trying to latch onto that low-brow bad taste  comedy genre which was in vogue in the late nineties with films like Kingpin, There's Something About Mary, Freddy Got Fingered, and things like that. Kingpin, There's Something About Mary, and even Freddy Got Fingered are all quite funny films though and have some memorable scenes.

That can't be said of Boat Trip - which isn't funny at all and is the sort of film you've completely forgotten as soon the end titles begin rolling. By making this type of film in 2002, Boat Trip had already (ahem) missed the boat. A typical example of Boat Trip's modus operandi is Gooding Jr trying to propose to his girlfriend in a hot air balloon but vomiting over her instead because he doesn't like heights. Roger seems to have enjoyed his time making the film and took the role because it offered him the chance to have a Medditerranean cruise with plenty of days off. He cheerfully defends the film as harmless nonsense in his autobiography although he does note that the critics weren't too kind. Boat Trip was shot on a Greek cruise ship which visited Alexandria, Istanbul, and Rhodes so I'd imagine Roger had a very nice time indeed shooting this film.

And what of Roger in the film? Well, Roger seems to be enjoying himself whatever the audience might make of this film. He's a suave presence as ever and I like his pastel suits and shirts. Very colourful. Lloyd Faversham is an old smoothie and wastes no time in offering Sanz a bite of his sausage. In England we call them bangers, he adds. Faversham is basically James Bond crossed with John Inman's Mr Humphries and - as ever with Rog - the film is at pains to remind you that he used to be 007. "You may think of me as simply a hard-partying old queen, but for your information I spent 32 years in the SAS, serving Her Majesty, the real Queen. I've been in five different theaters of war, done 490 jumps, 27 of them into hostile territory." Boat Trip is a pretty awful film but Rog completists will probably want to watch his scenes anyway. Look out too for brief appearances by Richard Roundtree and Will Ferrell. If I was taken hostage and forced to choose between watching Spice World or Boat Trip again which one would I pick out of the two? That would be like asking if you'd rather have greyscale from Game of Thrones or a severe case of leprosy. Both of these films are absolutely terrible.


- Jake

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