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Pistol review – Danny Boyle’s wonky Sex Pistols show is like Punk: the Panto!
Johnny Rotten is the Artful Dodger crossed with an animated rodent in Boyle’s frustrating series that feels so cartoonish it falls totally flat
The Sex Pistols lasted for three years, and it’s fair to say that a lot happened to them in that brief, blinding flash of late 1970s chaos. Strange, then, that Pistol (Disney+) ends up feeling too fast and too loose. Danny Boyle directs this frenetic yet baggy six-part dramatisation of the Sex Pistols story, largely told through the eyes of guitarist Steve Jones. It is adapted by Baz Luhrmann favourite Craig Pearce, from Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy, which explains the Jones-heavy perspective. The problem with this is that it gives the story a wonky, skewed focus and a frustrating sense of delayed gratification.
The first episode is all about Jonesy (Toby Wallace), as Jones is known in the series, and his terrible, traumatic childhood and life as a young thief. “Ruffians like you excite me,” purrs a predatory Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), when Jonesy is caught trying to steal from his and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Sex. Westwood’s character is wheeled out to explain things, while McLaren sloganeers. He speaks in statements such as “You’re a product of state oppression,” urging the band to “tear into each other like the seditionary sewer rats that you are”. When Johnny Rotten finally appears and spends an episode or two trying to write lyrics, he talks in scraps of what will become lines from their handful of songs. It’s Pistols: the panto.
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