Brexit: The Uncivil War Review - 4 Ups & 4 Downs

2. It Revels Too Much In Its Monstrous Characters (Without Offering Real Assessment)

The biggest problem with Brexit - particularly for anyone who believes the people who masterminded the successful Leave campaign shouldn't be celebrated - is that it delights a little too much in how cunning its monsters are. And they are monsters, more than real people.

There's an element of the way American Psycho revels in Patrick Bateman's monstrosity here too: the characters like Cummings, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Douglas Carswell are presented in a way that you might expect a caustic political satire like The Thick Of It to, but it's ostensibly a "true story" telling of the events of the Brexit vote.

That contradiction weirdly makes the caricatures, which range from deadly accurate to just comical enough to suggest parody, come across as sort of affectionate, Spitting Image-style portraits. We're simultaneously invited to believe they're toxic by material that paints a very real picture of them as villains, idiots, fools and Machiavellians, but also told insistently that it's trying to remain impartial.

This SHOULD have been a pitch black comedy. They should have just done it as an episode of The Thick Of It with Cumberbatch in as a guest star. The conflict wouldn't have been there then.