Episodes

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, the dads dive into Luc Besson’s cult aquatic epic The Big Blue — a nearly three-hour blend of freediving rivalry, French mysticism, Jean Reno charisma, dolphin longing and some deeply questionable romantic choices. What we covered Le Grand Bleu: the original title, the French phenomenon, and whether saying it properly makes the film any shorter. The director’s cut runtime and the general feeling that 168 minutes is a lot of ocean. The black-and-white childh...

The Bad Dads turn to Netflix for The Life Ahead, the 2020 Italian drama directed by Edoardo Ponti and starring Sophia Loren as Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor and former sex worker who now cares for the children of other sex workers in Bari. The conversation begins in properly jaded Monday fashion — recorded after England’s glorious defeat of Mexico at the Azteca, naturally — before moving through recent watches including The Armstrong Lie, Marco Pierre White YouTube rabbit holes, the new Cape Fear, Shot Caller, The Boys, and a brisk top-five round on dynamite and explosions. When the dads get to the film, Sidey sets up Madame Rosa’s world: she is elderly, Jewish, traumatised, proud, and scraping by, pawning her candlesticks to cover the rent. Into her life crashes Momo, a young Senegalese orphan living with Dr Cohen, who steals Rosa’s bag in the market and is then forced to apologise. The apology goes badly, but Dr Cohen persuades Rosa — via an increasingly persuasive cash of…

The Bad Dads gather for a compact but enthusiastic review of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, a film that turns one hot jury room, twelve men and a supposedly open-and-shut murder case into one of cinema’s great arguments about reasonable doubt. After the usual loose opening — Masters of the Universe chat, World Cup annoyance, and the rejected idea of everyone starting the episode by arguing — the dads settle into the 1957 Henry Fonda classic. Cris remembers watching it with his dad, Dan calls it an absolute classic, and Reegs immediately frames it as “an incredible piece of science fiction” because it imagines a world where people can be persuaded by rational thought and truth still matters. The discussion follows the jury’s movement from an initial 11–1 guilty vote to the final reversal. Juror 8 does not claim the accused boy is innocent; he simply refuses to send him to death row without talking through the evidence properly. From there the dads work through the key doubts: the “…

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, the dads mark England week with a suitably subtle and tasteful main feature: Louis Leterrier’s Grimsby / The Brothers Grimsby, Sacha Baron Cohen’s aggressively filthy spy-comedy about a football hooligan reunited with his long-lost MI6 agent brother. The episode opens with Reegs introducing a show “to entertainment as VAR is to…” before promising misplaced national pride, confident incompetence, and enough disrepute to trouble the FA. Pete makes his triumphant return, Dan is absent for dinner with his mum, and the dads are already half-focused on England playing later — which gives the whole episode a lovely atmosphere of heat, football, lager, and people trying to finish before kick-off. The Top 5 England section takes the brief very loosely, which is usually where the best nonsense lives. Pete starts with English stereotypes in film — bad teeth, bad food, villains, tea, class, accents, and the baffling sandwich ubiquity of mayonnaise. Reegs n…

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, Sidey, Reegs, Dan and Cris get on the road for Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, the warm, humane, politically charged travel drama about young Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Alberto Granado crossing South America on a rapidly dying motorcycle. The episode opens with the usual Bad Dads detours — football, podcast housekeeping, dubious intros, David Walliams antipathy, and some listener follow-up — before the Dads rev into a Top 5 Motorcycles discussion. The nominations range from the iconic to the ridiculous: Arnie’s Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in Terminator 2, Tom Cruise’s Kawasaki in Top Gun and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the Easy Rider Captain America chopper, Indy and Henry Jones Sr. in the Last Crusade sidecar, Tron’s light cycles, Dumb and Dumber’s scooter, John Wick’s katana bike fight, Fonzie’s Harley, Judge Dredd-style sci-fi bikes, and Dan’s heartfelt case for Burt Munro and The World’s Fastest Indian. That motorcycle theme lead…

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, the dads begin with a very on-brand Top 5 Holidays segment — cancelled flights, Malta dread, mogging relatives, childhood package holidays, karaoke trauma, and the usual British-abroad horror — before moving into Charlotte Wells’ devastating debut feature, Aftersun (2022). The main review focuses on Sophie, an adult looking back through camcorder footage of a holiday she took in Turkey with her young father Calum when she was 11. The dads discuss how the film works less as a conventional plot and more as an emotional reconstruction: memories, fragments, gestures, half-understood moments and the adult Sophie trying to understand what her child self could not see. Reegs leads the breakdown of the film’s structure: the camcorder opening, the recurring rave imagery, the cheap holiday resort, the single-bed room, Calum hiding cigarettes and pain, the expensive scuba mask, the rug, the karaoke scene, the beach/sea imagery, Under Pressure, and the fin…

This week on Bad Dads Film Review, the dads head to Italy — via Denmark — for Netflix’s gentle food-and-feelings romance Toscana (2022), a film about a joyless Michelin-adjacent chef, an inherited Tuscan estate, rustic olive oil, family trauma, and one extremely unfortunate fiancé. Before the film, there is a suitably leafy Top 5 as Dan’s plant theme produces killer tomatoes, Audrey II, Ents, Leon’s beloved houseplant, Martian potatoes, Interstellar corn, Batman’s blue flower, Tomacco, Swamp Thing, Groot, and a suspicious number of plant puns from Reegs. There is also a sombre walking football update after Dan and Sidey’s side suffer playoff-final heartbreak on penalties. The Toscana discussion follows Theo Dahl, a precise Danish fine-dining chef whose father’s death sends him to Tuscany to sell the family restaurant. There he meets Sophia, argues about ice cubes, rediscovers food “by feel”, agrees to cook a wedding to push up the sale price, and inconveniently falls for the bri…