In the Loop – 2009 | 106 mins | Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Armando Iannucci’s BAFTA award-winning satirical sitcom The Thick of It is brought to the big screen, starring Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini, Peter Capaldi and Steve Coogan. The hilarious and biting satire on British-US relations during the lead up to conflict in the Middle East features an array  of morally empty press secretary’s, junior ministers and advisor’s in the corridors of power in Whitehall and Washington DC. Peter Capaldi returns as the Machiavellian Prime Ministerial master of spin and Chris Addison is again an ineffective unscrupulous Whitehall junior policy adviser. Steve Coogan also contributes a memorable cameo as disgruntled constituent.

Britain and America; friends and allies as far back as anyone can remember. Both the US President and UK Prime Minister fancy a war but not everyone agrees including dove-ish US Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy, US Army General (James Gandolfini) and a floundering British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander). When Foster accidentally announces on national TV that ‘war is unforeseeable,’ the British government is sent into a spiral of chaos and spin propagated by verbosely aggressive Director of Communications, Malcom Tucker (Peter Capaldi).Foster attempts to neutralise his off-the-cuff comment by telling the British public to prepare to ‘climb the mountain of conflict’ but soon finds himself bundled off to Capitol Hill on a fact-finder where he becomes both a pawn for the secret war committee and a poster-boy for the General and the Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy’s anti-war campaign.