The latest film to tap into the limitless pool of British working class youth for inspiration, with films like Attack the Block and The Kid Who Would Be King, is Ninian Doff’s Get Duked!, a black comedy that turns the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award into a fight for survival for a group of British teenagers.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) is a rite of passage for many of the UK’s youth. It was set up by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in 1956, as a youth awards program that recognizes children for completing a series of self-improvement exercises, one of which is an expedition where groups would plan, train for, and complete an adventurous journey using teamwork and orienteering skills.
Considering the award was designed to attract young people who were directionless and steer them in the right direction, it’s very appropriate that Doff has devised a light-hearted horror-based movie on the award that showcases many of the societal issues and arguments that affect young people today.
And the social commentary is right there from the start. We see a wartime-era advertisement/introductory video of eager youth embarking on the DofE smash-cut into a tableau of today’s youth, who are vapid, uninterested, fashion-obsessed and, most importantly, glued to their phones. This is clearly both an indictment on our reliance on technology, but also, a parody on how certain people view the youth of today.
These three apparent delinquents, Dean (Rian Gordon), Duncan (Lewis Gribben), and DJ Beetroot (Viraj Juneja) make up three of the four characters who will eventually be fighting for their life, something the film gleefully foreshadows with acrostics spelling out death and an obvious noticeboard full of missing person’s posters. The fourth is Ian (Samuel Bottomley), a keen, well-behaved, well-meaning teenager who is somewhat of a loner.
Ian has volunteered to complete the DofE whereas the other three, a close-knit friend group, are being forced to do it as punishment for their misbehavior. However, very quickly into their journey we realize the group is being hunted by an organization made up of wealthy, upper-class, fox-hunt supporting types led by The Duke (Eddie Izzard) and The Duchess (Georgie Glen), who both have a lot of fun delivering quips in received pronunciation as they hunt the boys but can’t believe their language.
It becomes evident, then, that Get Duked! is pitting the working class youth with reputations for causing trouble against privileged, wealthy, and elderly people who consider them vermin. As a result we are forced to explore whether or not the youth of today are ungrateful and feral, or are the elderly, who admonish the youth, are out of touch and unfair to a generation who didn’t have the same chances and opportunities as them.
This is all packaged in a youthful and very funny cat-and-mouse hunt in the Scottish highlands, with Doff packing in a ton of really fun visual flourishes. The musical score is packed with a culturally relevant track-listing, including Run the Jewels and Vince Staples. The rabbit droppings that make people high lead to some hilarious visuals of multiplying heads, colors and pulsing bodies. There are fun asides and cutaways like the roll-call scene that lists each of the trouble-making trio’s sins or the animated map sequence. The two original musical numbers are also spot-on, one in the style of home-made crude rap video teenagers would make, and the other a surprisingly accurate hip-hop music video set in a barn with sympathetic farmers as the extras.
Naturally, as we get to know the four boys we learn that there’s more to them than meets the eye. This is subtle at first, with the trio refusing to let one of them go down for blowing up a toilet so they all take the blame, and when DJ, wearing an all-white outfit, asks for help when crossing mud and receives it with no questions asked. But then this becomes overt when they realize they’re being hunted for sport and their qualities really shine through.
Given that this seems to be the main message of the film, I did feel that its handling of the three friends as useless, idiotic “chavs” grew slightly tedious and heavy-handed as the film developed, with there seemingly being little to redeem them. But this did improve around the half-way mark when the boys began to turn the tables on their pursuers and they started to become more human.
Those looking for an out-and-out horror film may be disappointed as the horror elements are certainly played down in favor of the comedy. This isn’t a film concerned with having teeth, or shocking people with violence, as it is light in gore, tension, and any real peril.
There’s also a subplot about the local highland police, who usually have nothing to do, trying to simultaneously capture a bread thief as well as investigate the chaos left in the wake of the boy’s fight for survival that, whilst looping back into the main narrative in a fun way during the climax, ultimately takes up time I would’ve preferred to have spent with the four boys as they bond. It’s fun seeing Kate Dickie as the head police officer though.
Get Duked! is a film that makes its message very clear in its final act with a fantastic use of Deus Ex Machina (a school bus saving them, highlighting the importance of education) — young people/millennials are too often blamed for the problems of the world by people unwilling to look at themselves and their contributions toward them.
As such, when we see our protagonists passing over the tools of their survival to another group about to embark on the challenge, it becomes a rallying cry to the youth of today: support each other, work as a team, and even though people will try to stop you, you can achieve anything. A message of hope for the future presented in an extremely fun way that’s, perhaps, never been more relevant than it is now.
Get Duked! will be hitting Amazon Prime on August 28th.
