Quick Take
- Narration: Ayoade self-narrates as the fictional Gordy LaSure, the double-layered performance, Ayoade playing a failed Hollywood type playing a film critic, is what makes the whole project work.
- Themes: Action movie misogyny and genre cliche as satirical targets, the gap between passionate cinephilia and actual taste, the comedy of earnest wrongness
- Mood: Dry, arch, and deliberately uncomfortable, literary satire performing as macho film-bro monologue
- Verdict: One of the stranger audiobook releases in recent memory, a sustained character performance from Ayoade that rewards listeners who enjoy satire working at the level of voice and form rather than explicit punchline.
I was halfway through The Grip of Film when I realized I had been laughing at things I could not immediately explain. Not at jokes, at sentences. At the specific wrongness of Gordy LaSure’s confidence about everything. At the gap between how much Gordy loves film and how little he understands about what he is watching. Richard Ayoade’s fictional film critic is a genuinely original comic construction, and the audiobook, narrated in full character by Ayoade himself, is the only correct format for this material to exist in.
Gordy LaSure is a failed Hollywood script doctor who lives in his Jeep and has opinions about film that are simultaneously passionate, specific, and comprehensively incorrect. His critical apparatus is built on a deep love for 1980s and 1990s action cinema: Dirty Harry, Porky’s, the Steven Seagal catalog, which he deploys with the language and authority of high academic film criticism while arriving at conclusions that are somewhere between aggressively wrong and helplessly revealing. The book is a satire of a very particular kind of movie opinion, the kind held by men who have watched a great deal of film and drawn from it mostly confirmation of existing attitudes about women, action, and what constitutes a story worth telling.
Ayoade Performing Gordy Performing Criticism
The recording is a double performance: Ayoade, playing LaSure, playing a film critic. This architecture requires the listener to hold multiple registers simultaneously. When Gordy makes a claim that is obviously a parody of action-film thinking, such as his assertion that Titanic is one of only a handful of films that are actually good, the joke operates on the gap between Gordy’s certainty and the listener’s knowledge. But Ayoade never tips his hand. He delivers LaSure’s most egregious opinions with the same vocal register as his more defensible observations, which means the comedy requires the listener’s active participation. As reviewer Mark noted, anyone who watches Ayoade’s work will read this as satire, but delivered straight, it carries a secondary layer of unease. That unease is intentional and is the more interesting part of the book.
What This Is Actually About
Reviewer Jonathan Schwarz identified the book accurately as a total sendup of the terrible misogynistic and corny action movie tropes running strong in the 1990s. This is correct but also slightly incomplete. The Grip of Film is also about the kind of criticism that loves movies without understanding what movies are doing, the passionate bad reader, the enthusiastic misinterpreter. LaSure loves Dirty Harry as sincerely as any auteur theorist loves Rohmer. The comedy is not that he is wrong in the way casual viewers are wrong; it is that he is wrong in the way people who care deeply and pay close attention are sometimes wrong, which is a more specific and uncomfortable target.
The Companion-Piece Context
Reviewer Juanita Sherpa noted being a fan of Ayoade and treating the audio as essentially an Ayoade performance rather than a book to be critically evaluated on its own terms. This is a reasonable approach. The Grip of Film is a companion piece to Ayoade on Film, the first book, more conventionally formatted. While it works as a standalone, listeners who have experienced Ayoade’s public persona, his interviews, his directorial work, his television appearances, will find LaSure funnier because they know how far Gordy is from Ayoade’s actual sensibility. The performance gap is where the comedy lives.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
The ideal listener appreciates literary satire delivered in character, has enough familiarity with 1980s and 1990s action cinema to catch the specific parody targets, and enjoys Ayoade’s particular brand of extremely dry British comedy. Skip it if you need comedy with clear escalation and explicit punchlines, or if the concept of a five-hour deadpan character performance sounds like effort rather than pleasure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gordy LaSure a real person or a fictional character Ayoade invented?
Gordy LaSure is entirely fictional, a character invented by Ayoade to satirize a specific type of action-movie enthusiast who mistakes confident wrongness for genuine criticism.
Do I need to have read Ayoade on Film first?
No. The Grip of Film functions as a standalone. Ayoade on Film provides context and makes some of the satire richer, but it is not required reading.
Is this comedic enough to work for casual listeners, or does the satire require a specific frame of reference?
The comedy is genuinely funny on the surface level. Gordy’s opinions are absurd enough to generate immediate laughs without needing to understand the satirical targets. But the deeper layers reward familiarity with 1980s-1990s action cinema and criticism culture.
How does The Grip of Film compare to Ayoade’s other work, his films and television appearances?
The sensibility is consistent with everything else Ayoade has made: dry, arch, deeply committed to the bit, and operating on at least two levels simultaneously. Fans of his directorial work on Submarine and The Double, and his television persona, will recognize the mode immediately.
