Going Nowhere Fast, by Bob Connally

In 2001, a relatively unknown 40-year old British comedian named Ricky Gervais burst onto the BBC. As David Brent, the hopelessly oblivious boss on The Office, the character describes himself as “a friend first, a boss second…probably an entertainer third.” Brent’s excruciating mugging, tone-deaf jokes, and attempts to be everybody’s friend, pained his employees and made the audience laugh and cringe in equal measure. Both in the lead role and as the co-writer and co-director of all 14 episodes (it was designed to be that short), Gervais managed to always walk a tightrope without falling off of it. Brent was almost a cartoon character but he remained just believable enough, as did the show, that viewers running across it unaware The Office was a mockumentary could have been forgiven for believing it was real.

The mastery of that tone and always playing by the rules he and co-creator Stephen Merchant set, made The Office more than a funny TV show. It made it a genuinely brilliant and hilarious masterpiece. The American remake, while very funny, always went for the biggest joke, tossing the realistic feel out the window whenever it was convenient. The British version always found the humor in the reality, giving it significantly more bite. (Also, David Brent never kidnapped a pizza boy while a camera crew filmed it, only to have no consequences arise from it. Sorry, that’s just always bothered me.)

More than a decade after the excellent series finale, a documentary crew is catching up with David to chronicle his last ditch attempt at becoming a rock star. He remains as clueless and pitiable as ever, showing he has not grown as a person in any way over the past 15 years. No longer a boss, he’s a sales rep for a bathroom supply company, short on friends and openly mocked by everyone else. Still, he remains upbeat as he sets out to take three weeks off work (with only 4 days of paid vacation) to tour with his band, Foregone Conclusion. Not surprisingly, the result makes Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove tour look like a smashing success.

Written and directed by Gervais, David Brent: Life on the Road runs 96 minutes and while it is often quite funny and occasionally genuinely moving, it’s too much time to spend with David front and center without Tim (pre-Watson Martin Freeman), Dawn (Lucy Davis, Shaun of the Dead), or Gareth (Mackenzie Crook, Pirates of the Caribbean) around. On The Office, David was the buffoonish head of an ensemble with whom we spent 30 minutes at a time. The audience was never really asked to relate to him either. The show gave us Tim and Dawn for that. In this film however, it’s a bit of a David overload and while Gervais hasn’t lost a step playing the character, as a filmmaker he’s not quite able to strike the right balance that he and Merchant did on the show. One minute we’re on his side, feeling like his bandmates are far too mean to him and the next we’re right there with them, not wanting anything to do with the man either.

David’s biggest fault is that he simply tries too hard to be liked, which comes through clearly enough without having several characters say it outright to the film crew that’s following them. It’s conveyed so perfectly in the looks on character’s faces throughout the film that it doesn’t need to be hammered home so hard.

The majority of the characters in the movie seem to be there specifically to react to David and don’t feel particularly fleshed out. An exception to this is rapper Dom Johnson (Ben Bailey Smith), a young man with significantly more musical talent than David. The circumstances of Dom being a part of David’s group are both funny and believable and he’s a likeable character throughout the film that we end up rooting for. His interactions with David are the most layered and subtle scenes in Life on the Road and the movie probably would have been better served to have a greater focus on that relationship.

David Brent wants so desperately to be liked by everyone and it seems that Gervais wants that for David too. Both would do better not to push so hard for that. The character remains cringe-inducing and very funny while incredibly human. Unfortunately, he seems to be in the exact same place at the end of this movie that he was at the end of The Office in 2003. For this reason, despite the way David Brent: Life on the Road ends, it appears he will keep making the same mistakes he’s always made, which ends the movie on a sad note that was not intended.

Despite its problems, I enjoyed several moments of this film (David’s songs are particularly hilarious) and it’s pleasant enough but it’s hardly a worthy successor to one of the funniest and greatest TV shows of all-time. Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they were. Both David Brent: Life on the Road and the original BBC version of The Office are now streaming on Netflix.