The film is the British, in a very American way, poking fun at themselves and their Royal sacred cows. The material is fairly weak. The plot seems to have been constructed from a Comedy Writing 101 class formula – there is the requisite villain, the pure-hearted girl, the easygoing hero’s struggle between duty and himself, ample room allowed for lots of slapstick tomfoolery, and a colossal cop-out ending – the even more improbable twist that manservant Peter O’Toole is really an heir too. The face-value flatness of the material is enlivened though by John Goodman, one of the finest and most versatile comic stars in contemporary American cinema. The film’s best moments involve Goodman in an amusing series of vignettes poking fun at Royal and upper-class mores – playing cricket like it was a game of baseball, throwing frisbees with the Royal corgis, accidentally nicking ears during a knighting, getting china cups stuck on his finger while learning the art of tea-drinking and trying to make sense of terms like ‘spotted dick’. And there’s an amusing series of lines based on a potential misinterpretation of ‘fox hunting’: “Do you do a bit of fox hunting?” “Yes, I used to go out to the clubs every weekend.” But there’s not really much more to the film than that.