Words fail me, and yet I feel I must try.<br /><br />Imagine a truly terrible stage play. The dialogue is so atrociously off the believability scale, you find that your own internal organs are climbing up round the outside of your brain in an attempt to penetrate your inner ear to stop PLEASE GOD STOP this abomination. The story is tedious to the point where watching paint dry as an alternative could give you heart failure from sensory overload. The acting... well, with characters written like this, they could only be plausibly played by creatures of an entirely different species.<br /><br />Now picture it, not as some dim shadowy figures performing in 3D on a stage 100 foot away, which might make the theatricality slightly less grating, but on a HUGE movie screen. The pantomime timing, the huge close-ups of unspeakably unspeakable lines. The direction never letting you forget for one single second that this is a PLAY darlings. Every fake note reverberating round the auditorium like a death knell, making you intensely aware of your own mortality and the fact that you are scandalously wasting precious hours of the one life you have. There are people you love, and maybe you have never told them - not really. You could have spent the evening telling them, but no - instead you are here, in a cinematic prison of abject misery.<br /><br />Because there is a lot of literature and poetry discussed, The History Boys has a veneer of intellectual sophistication. However its script and direction is so monstrous in every regard (and a criminal waste of some fine acting talent) that your life would be far more greatly enriched by reading the Stockholm phone directory. Backwards. Twice. That it took the combined efforts of BBC Films, The UK Film Council (lottery funded) and Fox Searchlight to bankroll this is an utterly damning indictment of the British Film Industry.<br /><br />Everyone involved should be placed in detention. For all history. Twice.