Released: 10th April

Seen: 14th April

Love Wedding Repeat is one of the blandest, stupidest and most pathetic attempts at a rom-com that I’ve ever seen. There is no other way to even start this, I don’t feel like trying to find some esoteric tangent that I could go on, the film is bad and pathetic and I do not like it for even a second. You want a film to make you hate the concept of marriage in totality? Have I got a film for you? A pathetic film that sells itself on looking pretty and having attractive actors with British and Italian accents say things that they believe are jokes but under the faux-pretty surface lies one of the ugliest messes I’ve ever laid eyes on.

The entire plot revolves around Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) and her wedding day. She’s meant to get married to Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) and her day would be great except the eternally creepy Marc (Jack Farthing) has turned up high out of his mind and, since no one thinks it’s a good idea to punch him in the face and have the cops take him away for trespassing, he’s causing all sorts of problems. Now Hayley’s brother, Jack (Sam Claflin) has to try and keep Marc out of the way by drugging him with something but then there’s a hilarious comedic mix-up that causes someone else to be roofied and we get to see the rest of this madcap wedding go on, because Jesus has abandoned us and we are doomed to suffer.

Nothing about this film works. NOTHING. Its core gimmick that it tries to lean on is this idea of chance, namely “what would happen is someone else at this specific table was roofied, how would that change the events of the wedding. This could actually have been interesting if the film did anything with it but out of eight potential outcomes, one of them takes up the first hour of the film, then six of them take up a silent montage that takes two minutes, then the rest of the film plays out the eighth potential outcome. Congrats, your only interesting gimmick isn’t even used well so all we have left are the characters… so nothing, there’s nothing here.

Every single character is as 2-dimensional as they can get. The only character that has anything resembling a character is Marc, the cocaine-addicted creep who wants to ruin the wedding of someone he’s been stalking since he was 15. Great place to put all of the energy there. Everyone else is basically “Pretty British/American/Italian actor reciting lines” and oh my god do they not have anything resembling good lines to say. This film’s idea of a running joke is to have someone wear a kilt that makes their testicles itch and have them constantly bring up just how much their balls hurt… it was around the third “My balls hurt” where I wondered exactly what I had done to deserve seeing this film.

So this film’s gimmick isn’t done well and the characters are non-existent but at least we have some nice scenery to enjoy right? Wrong, the entire film takes place in a shitty beige building with nothing remotely interesting about it. The film is meant to be set in freaking Italy and instead of using that to maybe create some visually pretty comedic set pieces, we just get a whole ton of beige bullshit. It’s not even incompetently shot, that would imply something mildly interesting because I could sit there going “Oh, that looks awful”. It’s adequately shot beige, possibly intentional so you can focus on the dialogue.. You know, objectively the worst part of this entire affair.

None of the jokes are even remotely good. You would’ve been better off giving everyone basic character descriptions and letting these non-comedic actors ad-lib because maybe a joke might’ve formed. As it is our jokes are “My balls hurt” and “Oh, what were you wearing because the Taliban doesn’t like exposed breasts” and those are the two jokes I remember. This isn’t hard, this is a basic farce set up and with any amount of time or effort, you could have a fun little farce where they try to pull the wedding off and keep the cocaine addict busy but nope, no we’re stuck with boredom and bullshit that offends with how bland it is. I’m actually pissed because this film doesn’t even try to be good, it’s coasting on pretty despite it being objectively ugly.

Love Wedding Repeat will make you believe that all marriages should be banned, at least any marriage that looks like this. It’s unfunny uninteresting garbage that can only claim to be well shot and have attractive people in the cast, but then again porn can also make that claim and at least porn has something of value to offer. The only time in this entire movie I even approached a laugh was when, inexplicably, they started to play The Barber of Seville and I sat there picturing the classic Loony Tunes cartoon The Rabbit of Seville and let my memories of Bugs Bunny provide me with a temporary escape from the sheer misery I was feeling. The only way this is avoiding my worst list at the end of the year is if I’m lucky enough to forget about it and considering how much of a nothing this film is I think that’s a distinct possibility.

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