Queen and Country

John Boorman's sequel to his much-loved 1987 film Hope and Glory is right up there (with Ingmar Bergman's Saraband) for the record for the longest gap a director has taken between his original film and its sequel. Only nine or so years are meant to have passed since Bill Rohan (played here by Callum Turner) was a boy living in Blitz-torn London. Now he's a strapping young man with a keen interest in movies doing his National Service stint. Not a lot really happens here - Bill survives army life at a training camp and experiences a tepid first love with a disturbed young woman (a miscast Tamsin Egerton). The acting is wildly uneven, although David Thewlis provides reliably good value in a supporting role. What a shame Boorman chose to dramatise a fairly dull stretch of his life instead of going for what clearly should come next: his first steps toward becoming the director who would go on to make 1967's Point Blank and 1972's Deliverance.