...Just kidding, he looks and sounds nothing like Khrushchev is real life (from what I've seen), but that's the joke and it's a funny one at that.
Overall the movie is sharply written, characteristically British, and mostly funny. Director/co-writer Iannucci may not be the most visually literate of directors-other than a few great scenes like the closing shot he bounces around in pseudo-documentary TV show style-, but he makes up for it with pacy, almost surreally sublime bits of dialogue. The dialogue is really the star of the show, at times seeming almost like something a disgruntled Lubitsch could have come up with. (Okay, maybe not Lubitsch, but at least Billy Wilder).
However, Iannucci then make the near-fatal mistake, resorting to sporadic bits of crudity (that ending!) and bouts of distracting profanity, almost as if he doesn't trust the material is edgy enough. Every time he does so, the Lubitsch/Wilder veneer of sophistication drops away and we are given glimpses of a juvenile modern comedy aimed at the college-dropout-trying-to-pose-as-adults crowd. It's really too bad, given that this could have been on par with the greats, and came closer than any other recent 'comedy' I can think of.
Overall the movie is sharply written, characteristically British, and mostly funny. Director/co-writer Iannucci may not be the most visually literate of directors-other than a few great scenes like the closing shot he bounces around in pseudo-documentary TV show style-, but he makes up for it with pacy, almost surreally sublime bits of dialogue. The dialogue is really the star of the show, at times seeming almost like something a disgruntled Lubitsch could have come up with. (Okay, maybe not Lubitsch, but at least Billy Wilder).
However, Iannucci then make the near-fatal mistake, resorting to sporadic bits of crudity (that ending!) and bouts of distracting profanity, almost as if he doesn't trust the material is edgy enough. Every time he does so, the Lubitsch/Wilder veneer of sophistication drops away and we are given glimpses of a juvenile modern comedy aimed at the college-dropout-trying-to-pose-as-adults crowd. It's really too bad, given that this could have been on par with the greats, and came closer than any other recent 'comedy' I can think of.