As I settle in for part 3, I silently ponder what I have become. I am a 39-year-old man, sat alone and bleary-eyed watching 2014’s Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey? on my phone at a Premier Inn breakfast buffet at 8am on a Sunday morning. It’s surreal, but I’m so determined to stick to my strict one-Christmas-movie-every-day quest that this simply has to happen. Katie and I were at a wedding last night and up early to get home to let the babysitting grandparents away. This feels like the only chance I will get to watch a movie today, so I commit. It feels weird and I’m worried other people at the buffet bar can see me. Never mind that, though. Eyes on the prize. I dive in.
I’m somewhat aware that this third instalment is flimsy as hell and inherently ridiculous, yet in my knackered state I find it oddly heartwarming and satisfying. I find the whole couldn’t-give-a-toss-what-the-haters-think audacity of the whole project very refreshing. This is like the Fast and Furious franchise for kids - they keep pushing the implausibility level until you stop caring, each new film adding just enough famous new faces and gimmicks to keep audiences coming back.
This time, Mr Peterson is nowhere to be seen, the school now apparently just letting mad mental Mr Poppy do whatever he wants. This time, the gimmick is “flash mobs”, which the internet reliably informs me are “ a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform for a brief time, then quickly disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression.” Now, this film is about flash mobs a lot. This film is so much about flash mobs that if you were to take a drink each time someone muttered the phrase “flash mob”, you would not be drunk - you would be dead.
Naturally, there is a winter flash mob competition with the prize being a trip to New York leading to numerous impressive, tightly choreographed festive song and dance routines. Oddly, the big competition is over less than halfway in, with Poppy’s kids losing to old enemy Mr Shakespeare’s toffee-nosed class. However, in the anarchic spirit of the Nativity franchise, Mr Poppy decides his kids deserve the prize more, so rob the tickets and go anyway. This doesn’t feel like the lesson to be teaching little ones at all, but I respect the audacity of it.
There’s another new teacher this time, the uptight, strict Mr Shepherd (Martin Clunes). Though he’s a right old stick in the mud, a run-in with the donkey from part two causes him to lose his memory, right before he was about to take his super-cute daughter Lauren (Lauren Hobbs) to NYC where he was to marry fiancee Sophie (Catherine Tate). Poppy takes it upon himself to “cure” Shepherd’s amnesia by doing lots of Christmassy stuff for some reason and they try to reclaim Sophie from sleazy American bastard Bradly Finch (Adam Garcia) who just happens to be the world’s number one “Flash Mobber”.
Though this is juvenile tosh, I thoroughly enjoy seeing Clunes back to his Men Behaving Badly best, playing a seriously silly character, reminding us makes a great dopy man-child. The film is refreshingly unpretentious, concerned more with entertaining hyperactive youths than with making sense. As I drain my fifth large breakfast bar coffee refill, I’m really starting to see the appeal.
The songs, again, are deliciously catchy and the kids charming, though the youngsters are sidelined for a lot of the film, which is a shame. However, Dude, Where’s My Donkey has enough solid jokes and manic silliness to make it all work. By this point in the series, I’m enthusiastic to watch the next one, just to see what further mad situations they can drop these characters into. Mind you, I’m not sure how they can top a donkey moonwalking atop the Empire State Building.
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