For a long time, it seemed like the most important predictive factor for Ricky Gervais projects was whether Stephen Merchant was involved. The Office, a joint Gervais-Merchant project, is one of the great comedies of all time. Extras, their follow-up, wasn’t as good but occasionally scaled the same heights. Gervais’ solo sitcom Derek, on the other hand, wasn’t great; Hello Ladies, from Merchant alone, was more ignored than panned but seems likely to rise in estimation as time goes by (particularly for Los Angelenos). Following Merchant but not Gervais has been a pretty trustworthy rule-of-thumb for years now.
So there was little reason to hope that Gervais’ return to his Office character David Brent in his new film David Brent: Life on the Road, had much potential, even if the trailer looked fine. Merchant is not involved and when asked about “the film of The Office” on Good Morning Britain seemed eager to distance himself:
It’s not a film of The Office, no, it’s Ricky doing a film about David Brent. … I’ve been doing stuff in my own groove and we sort of got out of sync in terms of our schedules.
The film’s premise takes a great but small gag from the show—David Brent’s delusion that he’s a talented songwriter, which he subjects his employees to—and blows it into a feature, which also didn’t seem promising. The world already has a great film about a touring rock band, after all. But the first reviews for David Brent: Life on the Road are in—it opens in the U.K. on Aug. 19—and they’re surprisingly good!
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph liked it a lot, calling it “the same mix of uproarious failure and sledgehammer pathos that Brent at his best was all about.” Variety’s Catherine Bray places it physically in the “world of motorway service stations, Costa coffee outlets and inadequate sliproads,” and thematically in the world of “relative notions of success, inadequacy, social hierarchy and desperation,” which sounds perfect. She also singles out the performance of Tom Bennett, who was so delightfully harebrained in Love and Friendship. Worryingly, however, she wasn’t a fan of the third act, which she described as sentimental and warned and said “may feel artificial to viewers drawn to the series’ persistent despairing streak.” (As though there were some other kind of fan of The Office.)
And some critics didn’t like it at all: Henry Barnes at the Guardian wrote that “at its worst … it’s small, shabby, and outdated,” and wished Gervais had had the courage to leave Brent be. Most damningly, Stephen Dalton at the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film “feels like the debut solo album by the lead singer of a once successful band, who is now surrounded by paid session musicians unwilling to challenge the boss over his substandard, self-indulgent coasting.” Which is a fair description of most of Gervais’ worst solo work, honestly.
Still, any positive reviews for David Brent: Life on the Road mean it will probably be worth checking out when Netflix eventually gets around to releasing it in the U.S. sometime in 2017. Brent’s best moments on The Office weren’t when he was cheerfully oblivious, they were the brief flashes of self-awareness when Gervais let the audience see his desperation and unhappiness. A catastrophic self-funded rock tour might be just miserable enough for him to really shine.
