To be sure, they do a lot of direct copying of Laurel & Hardy's signature gestures and vocal cadences, but it never feels like a stunt: it's more that both Coogan and Reilly have endeavored to recreate the mental state of the comedians, and thus re-enacted their movements and delivery from the inside, rather than just replicated their surfaces. Coogan looks only incidentally like Laurel, and a substantial amount of moderately-convincing latex gets Reilly to looking a bit more like Hardy, and anyway, they look far more like those men at the height of their fame, rather than the weary, frequently-ill figures they cut in 1953. Reilly, and they are up to some of the best biopic mimicry I have seen in a long time. Stan is played by Steve Coogan, Ollie by John C.

The film's trump card, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the cast.

Any old biopic can do the 'greatest hits' thing, but Stan & Ollie approaches 'At the Ball, That's All' with a hushed admiration that resembles the reading of religious scripture more than the restaging of a beloved movie scene. Instead, the film functions as a mixture of adoring cover band and fannish history, re-creating some routines for the pleasure of Laurel & Hardy's existing fans and loudly insisting upon the greatness of those routines for the edification of Laurel & Hardy's not-yet-fans, whom it clearly intends to produce. It was an eventful trip, and Jeff Pope's screenplay makes it even more eventful by compressing some material, ginning up a crisis in the pair's relationship, and accelerated the decline of Hardy's health, but one thing that it doesn't quite get around to doing is making this dramatic. This assumption is unhesitatingly shared by Stan & Ollie, a biopic of the duo that focuses on one short but important period of their career, a 1953-'54 tour of live shows in Great Britain and Ireland (it also includes a spurious prologue in 1937 that laboriously sets up the plot, and primarily serves to get the iconic 'At the Ball, That's All' dance from Way Out West its inevitable cameo). The best Laurel & Hardy films rank among the best screen comedies, period, a mixture of faultlessly choreographed slapstick, surprising verbal wit, and an underlying comradeship and love for craft that makes even the typical meanness of the form (their films general involve Hardy bullying Laurel and humiliation befalling them both) feel generous and warm. I take it as self-evident that to love cinema is to love Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, the comedy duo paired under the guidance of producer Hal Roach in the silent era and who made several wonderful short films before transitioning to sound and making several even more wonderful shorts and features in the 1930s.

Movie review stan and ollie