Kevin and Perry Go Large (movie) 2000

Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

London suburbia, the present. Teenage friends and part-time DJs Kevin and Perry are desperate to lose their virginities. Kevin's parents refuse to pay for a holiday in Ibiza, but when Kevin receives a reward for stopping a bank robbery he uses the money to pay for the holiday with Perry. Much to Kevin's disgust, his parents accompany them. At the airport in Ibiza, the boys are besotted with fellow teens Candice and Gemma. They encounter their hero Eye Ball Paul, a Manchester DJ. That night, the boys get into local nightclub Cream/Amnesia; Candice and Gemma are turned away.

Later, Candice and Gemma step out with Kevin and Perry, but the boys leave after being vomited on. At the hotel, Kevin's parents have noisy sex which Perry films. The next day, Eye Ball Paul finds the video and plays it in front of them. Humiliated, the boys flee and fall out, but they make up after hearing their mix will be played at Cream/Amnesia that night. The mix is played - as is the sex video. Eye Ball Paul tries to regain control of his show, but the crowd eject him, and Kevin and Perry become heroes. The girls, also shown on video, love being famous and agree to sex on the beach.

Review
In Zabriskie Point (1968), trance music and adolescent rebellion lead to mass-coupling among the dunes, Michelangelo Antonioni's symbol of the overturning of oppression everywhere. He might have saved himself embarrassment if he'd been allowed a glimpse of today's Ibiza scene. As captured in the sand-and-shagging finale to Kevin & Perry Go Large, this is certainly the mocking apotheosis of the Italian's silly 60s vision, of liberation as a function of youth, beauty and mass-marketed pop-culture cool.

Go Large is an amiable roll through vomit, poo and erections, public-humiliation and hating-your-parents gags, working through the most obvious permutations and a scatter of clever ones. Fans of Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke's characters get pretty much what they are after. Their foray beyond the television-skit format of Harry Enfield and Chums cheerfully enters the revolting world of Farrelly Brothers' humour. Connoisseurs of bodily fluids on screen will doubtless appreciate how the makeover sequence climaxes with a multiple zit-squeezing moneyshot.

It's commonplace to observe that classic British comedy, in its reactionary sitcom glory, always had problems gussying together feature-length plots for the big screen. There were other, far more disabling difficulties. Ever since Tony Hancock's The Rebel (1960), the line has always been that sex, liberation and pop-culture coolness, if they exist anywhere, will certainly never be visited on the viewer. If the 60s countercultural cliché was that the young have better sex than their elders, traditional BritCom could only bleat against such exclusionary cruelty by asserting no one ever has sex anywhere, good or bad. 'Alternative' UK comedy was committed to exorcising this bankrupt tradition, but it needed a less defensive tactic, at least towards sex. The early, punkier manifestation of this revolt adopted an overtly body-loathing puritanism. There's an underlying doughiness to Enfield's many comedy personas which can certainly elicit echoes of this disconcerting self-hatred, but his humour actually springs from a more generous, potentially more subversive solution to the impasse: call it the Comedy of the Redemption of the Naff. So in Go Large, sex and worldly success can even be visited on as gormless a blobling as Perry (Burke's performance is a triumph of amoebic counter-sexuality).

Here, not only do parents have more and better sex than their offspring, but (as important) this seeming nod to reality feels less like the overthrow of comedy convention than the establishment of its potential return. Enfield's achievement is the degree to which he can still comfortably have it both ways. Consider the film's single moment of unspiked grace: Kevin happens on his parents, stock stick-figure caricatures of middle-class normality, amorously duetting each other with the words of 'Wonderwall'. They can't, Kevin screams, have even heard of Oasis: yet the Gallagher brothers have (very publicly) been houseguests of the only British prime minister in modern history to be celebrated for achieving sexually active adulthood. Expressed purely in terms of Kevin's conformism - a risible bondage to outdated assumptions about the 'generation gap' - his apoplectic tirade is also a rant against the mass-media appropriation of all sites of potential revolt, from love's body to underclass mutiny.

Similarly, the Ibiza club has its 'No Monsters' door policy; to highlight the power-glamour of DJ Eye Ball Paul, Kevin and Perry's loutish idol, the acned and the obese are turned away. Intriguingly, the bouncer is a sly cameo from Paul Whitehouse, diffident co-architect and radical conscience of the Enfield school of comedy - but the real monster is the corruptly loutish Manc DJ himself, while his fat, unassuming assistant Baz is the film's secret hero. When Gemma and Candice are refused entry, clubland elitism is revealed as the lie at the heart of pop-culture cool's claim to be a vector of liberation.

Credits
Director Ed Bye
Producers Peter Bennett-Jones Jolyon Symonds Harry Enfield
Screenplay Harry Enfield David Cummings
Director of Photography Alan Almond
Editor Mark Wybourn
Production Designer Tom Brown
Tiger Aspect Pictures Ltd
Production Companies
A Tiger Aspect Pictures production in association with Icon Productions and Fragile Films
An Icon Entertainment International presentation
Executive Producers Bruce Davey Ralph Kamp Barnaby Thompson
Line Producer Waldo Roeg
Co-producer Paul Tucker
Cast
Harry Enfield Kevin
Kathy Burke Perry
Rhys Ifans Eye Ball Paul
Laura Fraser Candice
James Fleet Dad
Louisa Rix Mum
Tabitha Wady Gemma
James Murray Candice's Adonis