Review: Greatest Days - could it be magic? Nah, not really...

Greatest Days is the promise; the reality is a couple of the flattest hours you’ll ever experience in a cinema – proof, if we ever needed it, that there are times when the theatre can do so much more than film ever can.

Serving up Take That’s greatest hits through their fictional alter egos The Boys, Greatest Days genuinely tugged at the heart strings in its stage incarnation a few years ago. Much of that, however, is lost in a film version which manages to perk up towards the end but for the most part remains pretty inert – no matter how much energy an undoubtedly talented cast throws at it. Could It Be Magic? Well, frankly no. And that’s a shame.

The gist is that children’s nurse Rachel (Aisling Bea) casually enters a competition and wins tickets for her and a group of friends to jet off to Athens to see The Boys on their reunion tour – 25 years after she and her mates saw them as teenagers on a wild trip from Clitheroe to Manchester. Back then, it truly was the greatest day of their lives.

But the intervening years have stacked pretty much everything against them. For a start, they have completely lost touch with each other in the two and a half decades since, and it’s this that sets up the piece’s central mystery which starts to emerge as soon as they start to converge. You don’t have to be wildly observant to notice that the fabulously-close fivesome have now become a completely-estranged foursome. Once you manage to work out which one is missing, you’ll realise that her absence is the key to where it has all gone wrong.

The film flits between their schooldays in 1993 and the present as Rachel steels herself to invite her old school pals on the concert trip. We are supposed to wonder just what is it that is making her hesitate, but in truth, this first half is where the film is at its most lifeless, damaged as much as anything by the completely weird dialogue (and there is plenty of it) between Rachel and her hubby. Does any couple anywhere actually talk to each other like this? You worry that someone clearly thinks that they might – the most leaden, implausible exchanges you could ever hope not to hear. And that kind of sets the tone. Such conversation was probably OK in the heightened surreality of the stage show. It clunks heavily here – though in fairness there are some nice little signs of the times dropped in, reference to Britain’s bright EU future, for instance. Nice too to remember that dash to shove on Ceefax and actually be quite impressed by it. But not even the repeated appearance of The Boys can salvage much. Whatever the teenage girl do, wherever they go – and ditto for the older girls – The Boys turn up to deliver a little song and dance number. Whether they are on the bus, in the airport, in the kitchen, on the clifftops, there they are warbling and variously draping themselves around things. But never for a moment do the songs seem to emerge from the situation the girls are in. Mamma Mia is absolutely the template here – and Greatest Days falls woefully short. Things improve towards the end, and the story says some poignant things about the ways our lives diverge, particularly after tragedy, and also about the ways they might reconcile and heal. But Greatest Days remains an odd film which never sufficiently fizzes and certainly doesn’t sparkle.

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