‘Everything you are going to hear about in this film, you already know,’ says Russell Brand of his new movie

REVIEW: He may be passionate, but Russell Brand himself doesn’t think his new film, The Emperor’s New Clothes, offers viewers anything they don’t already know.

The Emperor’s New Clothes (M)

Director: Michael Winterbottom (The Trip To Italy)

Starring: Russell Brand.

Rating: *

The naked truth: all dressed up and no place to go

In his new documentary The Emperor’s New Clothes, British comic Russell Brand is having a Michael Moore moment.

He is going to tell you what is wrong with the world, and how you can go about fixing it.

Don’t worry. It’ll pass. After all, not even Michael Moore is capable of having a Michael Moore moment these days.

The powers-that-be woke up to the populist threat posed by rabble-rousing docos such as Moore’s seminal slamdunks Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 a long, long time ago.

Poor old Russell Brand is so late to the party — and often so wrongheaded in his arguments even when he is right — that you kind of feel sorry for the guy.

It does not help that Brand renders his own movie redundant as a work of consciousness-raising reportage from the outset.

Nothing new ... Russell Brand’s new film, while passionate, offers nothing new. Picture: Kate Uren

“Everything you are going to hear about in this film, you already know,” Brand tells us by way of introduction.

So unless you happen to have temporarily forgotten that multinational companies, banks, stockbrokers, corporate executives, government leaders and every employer great and small are all about making money at our expense, there is no real pressing need to hear what Brand has to say.

This is not to say there is zero worth to be drawn from Brand’s naive, yet passionate battle cry against big business and its contempt for the little man.

There are indeed isolated moments in The Emperor’s New Clothes where Brand proves himself capable of putting an all-too-human face to how entrenched self-interest is paving the way to society’s sure-fire self-destruction.

One side of the story ... In a movie centred around big company corruption, you never once see Brand talk to his authoritarian targets of choice. Picture: Kate Uren

However, keeping any kind of context in its right place is beyond Brand. At best, he invariably resorts to reeling off reams of rubbery data direct to camera, only to bounce off towards another real-world stunt before we can adequately process the information.

The one missing thread that ultimately sees The Emperor’s New Clothes completely fall apart concerns Brand’s access to his authoritarian targets of choice.

He has none. Though Brand is more than willing to show up at their head offices (or home addresses), he never once scores the face time that could have loaded his film as a weapon of change.

Instead, he is left to hassle the poor working stiffs manning the front desk or the security detail, many of whom are just doing their job on the meagre minimum wage Brand is angrily lamenting.