After starting with an epic video and launching straight into fast paced one liners, it’s clear that this parody show has the objective of mocking every action film we have ever seen. They do this with mixed results. At points we were in the palms of their hands, laughing along at the ridiculousness of it all and at other times they pushed us too far away, creating something too silly to follow. Eventually we were given enough time to settle into the concept in all its ‘this is supposed to be bad’ glory and the show starts to pick up some steam.
We couldn’t escape the youth of the performers on stage though, as they pranced around with pound shop guns and pushed slightly too hard for laughs. Something about them reminds me of juvenile versions of some great comic performers and no doubt with practice and refining this show could be a great sketch show as opposed to a very good one. Perhaps if they hadn’t tried to recreate every action show ever made they could have sieved through the material slightly more and extracted some of the jokes that didn’t work universally. Also, when happy accidents do happen, they shouldn’t feel so confined to the script that they can’t play with these and make the most of them theatrically.
What these guys do very well is pace the show and it builds and dips in energy just enough to peak right on time. They also have a nice mix of high-brow humour, dirty jokes and downright childish gags to make sure that this show has a bit of something for everyone. Armageddapocalpse has great potential with its immature silliness and given time to develop as a company and as comedians we can expect even better things from them in the future.
