One Chance - film review

David Frankel's heartwarming biopic sees James Corden as Welsh opera-singer Paul Potts, who won the first series of Britain’s Got Talent. Many facts of Potts's life have been changed but this is top Simon Cowell product-marketing, what do you expect? The truth?
23 September 2013

In 2007, amateur Welsh opera-singer Paul Potts won the first series of Britain's Got Talent. His album One Chance on Simon Cowell's label Syco sold 3.5 million copies worldwide but his second, Passione, did much less well and for his third he had to find another label, Cowell being nothing if not ruthless.

But here, to wring a little more juice out of the brand, hard on the heels of Syco’s One Direction movie This Is Us, is the company’s heartwarming biopic, relating Potts’s struggles towards fame directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me — the popular touch, then). Affable James Corden (only two chins in the right light) plays Potts with Potts’s own voice dubbed in whenever he breaks into song. Julie Walters is his doting mum, Colm Meany his gruff dad, Alexandra Roache the wife he met online, Mackenzie Crook his goth boss and pal at Carphone Warehouse.

The movie runs up only to his success in the first round of Talent, which he decides to enter on the toss of a coin. Until then, it’s All Setbacks. Potts is bullied at school. Potts gets into an opera course in Venice and sings for Pavarotti but Pavarotti tells him he’s no good. He collapses on stage after an appendix operation, he loses his voice with a tumour in his throat, he is knocked down by a car.

Then the talent show raises him to glory. A lot of the facts of Potts's life have been adjusted downwards for greater plangency. He grew up in Bristol, not Port Talbot; his dad was a bus driver, not a steel worker; that tumour was in the adrenal gland, not the thyroid. He wasn’t quite such a nonentity either, with a degree in philosophy, serving as the youngest Bristol councillor for the Lib Dems, etc.

No matter. This is top Simon Cowell product-marketing, what do you expect? The truth? A lot of the film, especially the courtship of Potts and his Julz, is touching and funny. It works. At the successful Toronto premiere, Potts himself came on stage after the movie and sang Nessun Dorma live, loudly, without any nuance.

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