Fast food executive Jim Ferguson stepped out of his 47th floor office to go to the bathroom... and ended up in the middle of World War I. History will be grateful forever.
1986-05-30
N/A
108 min
Unassuming catering salesmen Jim Ferguson falls through a time hole to 1917 where he saves the life of dashing Royal Flying Corps pilot James "Biggles" Bigglesworth after his photo recon mission is shot down. Before he can work out what has happened, Jim is zapped back to the 1980s......
I have to admit that when I was a child in the 1970s, I devoured "Biggles" books. The timelines of the stories were all over the place, but the exciting adventures of himself and his loyal stalwarts made for fun, boy's own reading. Sadly, though, much of the writing of Capt. W.E. Johns required a child's imagination to make it work. Try to put in onto a big screen and it doesn't really succeed. This isn't really a film about "Biggles" so much as about the eye-candy "Jim" (Alex Hyde-White) who gets caught up in some time travelling escapades when visiting London that see him working for "Commodore Raymond" (Peter Cushing) and our eponymous hero (Neil Dickson) as they try to thwart a cunning Bosch plan to use a sonic weapon to devastating effect during the first world war. It's an adequate story this, with decent enough effects and plenty of dog-fights, but the attempts to drag these characters into the 1980s has only limited success. What works about the characters in the books seems almost parodied here, and despite a scene in a nunnery where the young "Jim" simply refuses to be parted from his ultra-velcro'd skimpy towel, the rest of the film is pretty unremarkable. I think it most unlikely that these stories will ever see the light of day now - they are hardly politically correct even in the most tolerant of households, so it is a bit of shame that this bland effort will be his only cinema outing. Even the presence of the genial Cushing cannot really lift this from the realms of, well, why?
