Directed by Mike Cockayne. Starring Martin Maloney, Chris Tordoff, Owen Colgan, Peter Cassidy, Tom Kilgallon 16 cert, general release, 89 mins
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Buck in possession
of a Euro 2012 ticket is in need
of a detour to Amsterdam. This familiar trope – yes, they end up smuggling a package of drugs – provides the spine of the Hardy Bucks’ migration to the silver screen. Behind the fightin’ and schmokin’, we find a heart-
warming little-guy story.
The Hardy Bucks began their public life as a kind of Trailer Park Boys tribute act on YouTube before meme popularity and an RTÉ
series catapulted their pot-smoking, skirt- chasing, crap-talking, time-wasting brand of humour before
an appreciative cult audience.
Their first movie venture arrives courtesy of Universal Studios (no less) and an ill-fated trip to Poland where, it might be argued, they still fare better than the national team.
The road to Poznan is predictably fraught. The Viper (show-stealer Chris Tordoff), the boy’s wannabe gangsta nemesis, is the only one with match tickets. An astronomical bill from an Amsterdam establishment leaves the Bucks acting as contraband couriers between dodgy Dutch gangsters and dodgier Polish counterparts.
Inevitably, the sense of one-horse-town confinement that characterised the original web series gets a little lost when the chaps leave Mayo. Out on the road they’re never, we feel, as bored out of their skulls as they ought to be. At its best, the Hardy Bucks trade on the banality and scruffy surruralism of life outside the Big Schmoke (Galway).
Screenwriters Mike Cockayne and Gerry Greaney attempt to compensate for the grander scale by recreating the Bucks’ own brand of culchie existentialism and constraint within the confines of a camper van.
It doesn’t all work, but there’s certainly enough here to please the hardcore faithful or revellers still wondering what the hell they did in Poland. The Swinford posse know what you did last summer.
Expect sex toy-related mishaps and bollock-nakedness. But you probably suspected as much.
TARA BRADY
