Bill (2015) - Movie Review

Okay, so I saw Bill a couple of weeks ago, and completely forgot to write a review on it. My bad. The thing is though, Bill is a very difficult film to review. Comedy is all subjective after all, so I have to put a disclaimer here that these are my personal thoughts on Bill.

Made from the people who brought us the wonderful Horrible Histories television series on CBBC, Bill chronicles the early days of William Shakespeare's career - from being part of a band called Mortal Coil to becoming a popular playwright. Of course, it plays fast and loose with historical accuracy and it's very much a Horrible Histories version of a Monty Python film, but this is no bad thing. Bill has so many clever in-jokes about Shakespeare and the time period that you really don't care about accuracy in this case.

It's a very, very funny film, very quotable and is a fantastic family film to watch again and again on DVD. If you have nothing better to do, go and see Bill with your family at the cinema, but it's not something that needs to be seen on a big screen. Sadly the cinematic 'letterbox' aspect ratio doesn't always work for the film, and it's probably more noticeable on a cinema screen. It looks like it should have been filmed on a 16:9 aspect ratio, as the wider screen allows the audience to notice some of the production issues caused by Bill's fairly low budget. The opening looks great on location, but the 16th Century London sets look repetitive and a little on the cheap side - not too bad for a TV Movie, but for a proper cinema film...not so much. 

However, Bill is so entertaining that these flaws can easily be overlooked.
The actors are all terrific in the film, with great comedic timing, and the use of multi-role, for the most part, is really well utilized. Despite this though, there was one scene where Shakespeare actor Matthew Baynton appeared as a servant for Queen Elizabeth, where he looked almost exactly as he did when playing Shakespeare, which momentarily really confused me. This didn't occur for any of his other characters during the film, but this small moment did pull me out of the movie. Most of the time though, the multi-role worked very well, and each actor suitably overplayed their characters for added silliness.

There is very little else I can really say about Bill though. It's very, very funny, very quotable and most of the movie works very well and is very, very good. There are some minor problems with the film - a rather overlong ending can be added to that list - but Bill is so entertaining and so much fun that it's easy to be distracted from such flaws.