Directed by Armando Iannucci
(Not rated)
***
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A satirical look at international diplomacy
What The West Wing was to America, In the Loop is to Britain, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. While Aaron Sorkin used government as a “source of dramatic energy” for his TV show, director Armando Iannucci sees statecraft as a bottomless well of material for satire. Expanding upon his BBC series The Thick of It, Iannucci has created a film that’s “scads more acerbic than anything that would have been tolerated in the White House of Jed Bartlet.” In this brainy comedy, a dimwitted British minister of international development slips up in an interview and nearly commits Britain to a U.S.-led war, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Though Iraq war references are obvious, the jokes “are less topical than procedural.” Iannucci employs a mock-vérité approach to expose the dirty business of bureaucracy, where “opportunism trumps idealism” and everybody betrays everybody. Welcome to the wonderful world of institutional incompetence, said Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. Iannucci’s film is a “smart and sharp jab at the suits and skirts” who give democracy a bad name.
