24 Hour Party People: Press views

The film is set in the late 1980s

The UK press review 24 Hour Party People.

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The Independent

For all Coogan's energy, 24 Hour Party People is less fun than I anticipated. The film stumbles along from one anecdote to another, most of them intended to show just how mad Manchester could get as drugs and guns become the city's most covetable commodity. Yet Frank Cottrell Boyce's script doesn't do enough to make these supposed legends arresting; everybody talks the same flat, profane dialogue, which may have been true to the time but sounds monumentally banal in continual doses.

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The Guardian

The movie avoids any sort of moralising though it does appear to believe in good faith. While avoiding sentimentality, it can be subtly affecting. In an oddly powerful scene, the intense, alienated Curtis, on the eve of Joy Division's first American tour, watches Werner Herzog's Stroszek (a despairing account of a European holy fool's visit to the States) and commits suicide.

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The Sunday Times

Some will say that this is true rock 'n' roll movie-making, but it struck me as slightly irritating. The Factory story does indeed demand to be told in a fickle, eclectic style, but Winterbottom's version is a bit too short of underlying orchestration. Come the closing credits, you don't feel that you have experienced a proper movie, just a fizzy collection of sketches and conceits.

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The Daily Telegraph

It is - perhaps more daringly - a deliberate shambles of a movie. Winterbottom and Boyce couldn't be less interested in definitively covering all the bases in the smoothly coherent, telescoped manner we expect from true-story films. What we get instead is an unashamedly bitty jumble of key moments, anecdotal tangents, and a lot of people just messing around without any idea what they're doing.

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London Evening Standard

Winterbottom (together with ace lensman Robby Muller) pieces together the crazy paving of the material with a sense of wonder. Extraordinary images collide with the commonplace banality of existence in Manchester. It is a real shock to see the little suburban house where Ian Curtis lived (and died) after watching his frenzied stage performance; it is both funny and alarming to discover that Martin Hannet's coffin, oversized to contain his corpse bloated by alcohol and drugs, won't fit into the grave.