Will Hay in Windbag the Sailor: A Messy, Funny Disaster

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for Will Hay, you’ll probably find this charming enough to excuse the fact that it falls apart halfway through. It's the kind of movie where the lead character is such a buffoon that you're just waiting for the boat to sink, literally and figuratively. If you need tight, clever plotting, stay away. This is pure, unadulterated nonsense.

Will Hay is basically playing the same character he always does—the blustering, confident idiot who has no idea what he's doing. Watching him try to sound like a salty sea dog when he's clearly spent his life dealing with canal muck is peak comedy for me. There is a specific scene where he tries to command the crew that just goes on for ages, and honestly, the silence when he stops talking is funnier than the dialogue.

The ship itself? It looks like it was made out of cardboard and bad intentions. It’s supposed to be an 'unseaworthy' vessel meant to be wrecked, and yeah, they really sold that part. The production design is pretty bargain-bin, but it adds to the weird, frantic energy of the whole thing. It’s not L'inhumaine, let’s put it that way.

• The bit with the coal barge is genuinely funny for about five minutes.
• The bad guys are so cartoonishly evil it’s actually kind of refreshing.
• The editing feels like someone was just cutting film strips with a pair of kitchen scissors.
• There is an awful lot of people shouting over each other in the last act.

There’s this one reaction shot of the shipping agent—I think it’s supposed to show him being cunning, but he just looks like he’s got a bad stomach ache. It lingers for about three seconds too long. It’s painfully awkward, and I loved every second of it.

You can tell the movie starts running out of steam when they get out to sea. It’s like the writers realized they didn’t have enough jokes to fill the runtime and just decided to have everyone run around the deck until the credits rolled. It’s a bit of a slog, but it’s a sincere slog.

If you’re looking for a film that feels like a bunch of people throwing ideas at a wall to see what sticks, this is it. It’s not great, but it’s definitely not boring. Sometimes a movie just needs to be a loud, silly distraction for an hour. This one manages that just fine. ⚓