Fuck

The insight-neutral scrag ends of what feels like ten decent documentaries on censorship, semantics, social policy and broadcasting coalesce in this painfully self-satisfied and poorly made ‘shock-doc’ in which comedians, academics and commentators tell us everything we ever wanted to know (and much we already learnt in the playground) about the word ‘fuck’. This is a film born in the furthest reaches of the idea cul-de-sac that comes across like an archive of naff pub conversations, where smug liberals whinge about uptight conservatives and vice versa. It’s decent of director Steve Anderson to give a voice to both sides, but his cheerleading for the left is so transparent that he might as well have pasted CGI horns and pitchforks on the moral-decency brigade. At the end, comedian Drew Carey idly enquires when the ‘cunt’ movie is going to be made, so strap yourselves in for the sequel… or just head to Wikipedia.