Military Wives: Neon NZ Film Review

The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo knows exactly where he wants to go with this tale of a group of army wives who're left on base and killing time when their husbands are deployed to Afghanistan.

And to be fair, he should - after all, he achieved the same level of crowd-pleasing success with The Full Monty in 1997, a tale of seemingly polar opposites and shambolic group of amateurs coming together to achieve glory under duress. (Even in Military Wives, there's someone within the group who's hopelessly out of their depth, but whose underdog enthusiasm wins through.)

Catastrophe's Horgan is Lisa, a freewheeling mum of a troubled daughter who butts heads with Scott-Thomas' prissy and uptight Kate, the wife of the base's brigadier.

Scorning the usual ideas from the icy Kate of knitting to pass the time and keep the Brit morale up ("It's a bit Little Women, innit" she decries), Lisa assembles the group into a singing group, despite opposition from Kate, who sees it more as a choir and the usual parade of stuffy numbers.

However, Lisa's more keen on drawing from the hit parade of her musical youth and the group finds a common bond - but when their boys are ambushed, tensions that have already been simmering inevitably blow over.

It seems churlish to dismiss Military Wives as anything but predictable formulaic fare, but in truth, that's exactly what Cattaneo achieves here. With a penchant for the obvious, the film falters into "could be a BBC four part drama where the wives face fractures and conflict before ultimately rising to the occasion and the bigger picture" territory.

There are no surprises here and the playing safe causes a slice of tonal whiplash when the drama explodes like a well-timed bomb in the middle of proceedings - it's all very simply telegraphed and signposted early on.

And yet, underneath its fluffy fuzz and cloak of familiarity, Horgan and Scott Thomas elevate the film's penchant for predictability to a more acceptably amiable level.

From the visual cue of the opposition of their outfits (Lisa's more laissez-faire, and Kate's more buttoned up and prissy) to the acerbic banter and bickering, both Scott Thomas and Horgan turn the banalities of females fighting and picking at each other into something more humane - even as the cliches come tumbling forward in their direction. In truth, they elevate the film, and give it more credit than it is sometimes due.

It may sing a good tune for a crowdpleasing piece, and may aspire to easy (and occasionally well-earned) laughs throughout, but Military Wives, in parts, is surprisingly moving.

Just don't be surprised if at the end of all the opposition to the comfortably familiar and eye-rollingly obvious as the film follows its crowd-pleasing zero-to-hero algorithm, you leave singing from its admittedly corny songbook.