Review of St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009) by Martin S — 31 Jul 2010

A wildly entertaining and insane follow-up to 2007's St. Trinian's, The Legend of Fritton's Gold has Britain's worst behaved student body on the hunt for a buried treasure in an effort to thwart an age-old society of misogynistic woman-haters headed by Lord Pomfrey (played by David Tennant sans TARDIS). Whatever female agenda the first film had is made all the more apparent in the sequel, but the movie plays it all with so much camp and dark humour, it's neither alienating or offensive; in fact, its borderline ridiculous at points, which is either a good thing or a bad thing for the feminist subtext in the film, I'm not sure which.

What I am sure of is that St. Trinian's 2 is every bit a worthy successor to the first St. Trinian's film. Annabelle Fritton (Talulah Riley) is determined to do her school proud as the new head girl, but constantly finds herself mucking up the task. She's either too responsible, demanding that the student body meet weekly to discuss issues, or too irresponsible, demanding an increase of 80,000 pounds in pay for retrieving a stolen artifact on Lord Pomfrey's request despite the entire school suggesting she only ask for 30,000 pounds more (oh, those St. Trinian's girls...). Of course, Annabelle rises to the occasion through a little help from Kelly Jones (blink-and-you'll-miss-her Gemma Arterton) and her ancestor, the fearsome pirate Fritton.

The second movie is even more insane than the first one, which had its fair share of insanity. Here, the girls are unleashed on the streets of London in a big way, set to do war with a group of penile naysayers with all the gusto you'd expect from sociopathic students. David Tennant is clearly having fun here, so even though he's an ass, he's a funny ass. Rupert Everett and Colin Firth need to perform more love scenes together, because they are brilliant as on-again, off-again lovers Mrs. Fritton and a now-former-Education Minister. But what am I saying? Everybody's having a good time with this movie. How could you not?