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For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

As Good As It Gets

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

After leaving 20th Century Fox when their last American made feature film was completed in 1945, Laurel and Hardy took a long rest due to Stan's health problems. Oliver Hardy did take two featured roles in The Fighting Kentuckian and Riding High, but Utopia marked Stan's return and final film and the team's final film. Would they have gone out on something like Sons Of The Desert.The film is about Stan inheriting an island in the South Seas and a yacht to sail there with Ollie. They do land on an uncharted island and declare it home along with Max Elloy and Adriano Rimoldi who sailed with them. Later on the boys add some female population in the form of French cinema star Suzy Delair. Of course this is Laurel and Hardy so they're gentlemen, but what was wrong with other two?A survey party eventually comes and uranium is discovered. The boys were lucky it wasn't oil, but uranium turns their little paradise into a nightmare.Two things are terribly wrong with this film. Both Stan and Ollie were ill during the making, especially Stan and I guess it's a matter of opinion as to whether they were lucky to finish it at all. Laurel aged terribly from when last seen on screen and Ollie wasn't looking too good either. But Laurel and Hardy's comedy is simply not built for political satire. Possibly a Marx Brother or three could have made something of Utopia. Can you see Groucho as head of the new island that Ollie dubs Crusoeland?Utopia also doesn't have the production values of Hal Roach Studios let alone one of the American majors. The dubbing is terrible and the sound even worse.I think this would be a painful film for fans of Stan and Ollie to watch.

OK so it's not great either, but only because of how great Laurel and Hardy have been in the past. If this film received a total overhaul, with picture quality enhanced, add new dubbing to the badly dubbed voices and added a nice unobtrusive background music then this film would truly start to take shape. As it is, it does have it's problems. People do slate it for how old the boys look. Quel surprise! they were in their 60's and had led a 'life'. However, to me, they still came across as having bucketfulls of charm, and while this doesn't even come close to tickling the feet of their classics( I gave it a 4), it's worth a watch simply because it's them. To think otherwise would be impostorous!!

For new L&H fans, Stan and Ollie's appearance may be a shock. Stan looks VERY thin and has noticeably aged. Ollie, in contrast, has gained a LOT of weight.If you can overlook their appearance, and the slow moving subplot, Atoll K does have some good comedy routines. However, their more elderly appearance does hamper what would otherwise be good gags. You just can't laugh at Stan while he is dealing with an inflating raft in the ship's cabin. He looks like he's truly in agony, and you want to help him instead of laugh at him. Also, the film is poorly edited. The original movie was 90 minutes long, but when re-released, it was shortened to a more tolerable 60 minutes. Most of the footage taken out was from the subplot, so taking out the extra half hour improved the movie.While "The Boys" had more freedom to write gags and dialogue, nobody else on the crew had any idea what to expect in a L&H picture. Confusion and the illness of Stan and Ollie caused the picture to take an entire year to make! Not long after Atoll K was released, Ollie went on a diet and lost a LOT of weight, but it was too late.

***SPOILERS FOR THE SPOILED***'Utopia' (AKA 'Atoll K') is widely reviled by Laurel & Hardy fans. Being a fan of the Boys, myself, I had to find this stinker and see what was wrong with it. For the most part, very little is wrong, except for atrocious overdubbing, and Stan's appearance. He filmed this movie while in the throes of illness, and it really shows. He looks horribly drawn - actually, he looks drawn and quartered - but he soldiers on, playing the man-child character we know him best as. Similarly, while Babe Hardy is definitely aging and carrying more weight than in the team's glory days, his characterization is just as wonderful as ever.There are plenty of instances in this film where classic L&H humor takes over, such as the dinner scene in the cabin of the boat, or the cargo-loading sequence. The Boys are consistently in-character and deliver their lines with their usual spark.Knowing the story of the production of Utopia, it's amazing to me that they managed to grind out a movie, at all, let alone one that stayed true to Laurel & Hardy's long-established characters. As bad is it is, Utopia captures, for the last time on film, the essential sweetness of the Boys, and while I wouldn't recommend it as a 'great' Laurel & Hardy film, I wouldn't warn people away from it.My only real problem is with the ending. I'm one who does get tired of the stereotypical happy ending, but this is a COMEDY. The bad guys should get their comeuppance, and the good guys should win in the end. That's the way of comedy. Even the Great Stone Face, Buster Keaton, played to this rule. Though his characters sometimes wound up losing the game, you got the sense that they weren't daunted or hurt by it. In Utopia, our sweet girl winds up marrying the smarmy jackass she was running from, our stowaway stone mason winds up with his dreams crushed, building fences, the man who only wanted a country to call his own winds up killed and eaten, and the Boys themselves are stranded on an island with all their food and supplies stolen. It's just too sad, for a comedy.This film is usually found in the bargain bin, and it's worth that kind of price to see the Boys' last film, together. Don't expect miracles, but I found quite a few laughs in it.