Les Patterson Saves the World

Barry Humphries again put his variety characters on the big screen. Alongside the iconic Dame Edna Everage comes another caricature personification of the exalted tastelessness, mediocrity and boorishness of the Australian middle class in the form of diplomat Les Patterson. Unfortunately, this carousel of vulgarity, oafishness and cross-dressing veers too far into the genre of spy adventures. Les Patterson Saves the World thus only in places achieves the same liberating, unbridled and satirical energy as Humphries’s best projects, particularly the pair of simple plebeian farces about Barry McKenzie. On the other hand, however, after Humphries’s earlier projects shit on the idea of hippie London and then on the tradition of European horror movies, it is no wonder that he wanted to apply the same verve to skewering the global cult of that prim dandy James Bond. (01/08/2022)