word fail me and and yet i feel i must try . imagine a truly terrible stage play . the dialogue be so atrociously off the believability scale and you find that your own internal organ be climb up round the outside of your brain in an attempt to penetrate your inner ear to stop please god stop this abomination . the story be tedious to the point where watch paint dry a an alternative could give you heart failure from sensory overload . the acting . well and with character write like this and they could only be plausibly play by creature of an entirely different specie . now picture it and not a some dim shadowy figure perform in 3d on a stage 100 foot away and which might make the theatricality slightly less grating and but on a huge movie screen . the pantomime timing and the huge close ups of unspeakably unspeakable line . the direction never let you forget for one single second that this be a play darling . every fake note reverberate round the auditorium like a death knell and make you intensely aware of your own mortality and the fact that you be scandalously waste precious hour of the one life you have . there be people you love and and maybe you have never tell them not really . you could have spend the evening tell them and but no instead you be here and in a cinematic prison of abject misery . because there be a lot of literature and poetry discuss and the history boys have a veneer of intellectual sophistication . however it script and direction be so monstrous in every regard ( and a criminal waste of some fine acting talent ) that your life would be far more greatly enrich by read the stockholm phone directory . backwards . twice . that it take the combined effort of bbc film and the uk film council ( lottery fund ) and fox searchlight to bankroll this be an utterly damning indictment of the british film industry . everyone involve should be place in detention . for all history . twice .