Film Review:
Love Wedding Repeat

At any rate, you know what to expect with this one, as a clutch of improbable stereotypes swirl around a major event and farcically weave in and out, although here Craig throws in a narrative trick after an hour or so that not only doesn’t really work, but also shows how desperately thin the material truly is.

A flashback has the English Jack (Sam Claflin, a long way from Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale) trying to kiss Dina (Olivia Munn), his sister’s pal, after a lovely weekend in Rome, but instead fate intervenes and he’s whisked home to London. Three years later and he’s back again for the wedding of sis Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) to Roberto (Tiziano Caputo with nothing to do), and endless dramas naturally arise surrounding: Bryan (Joel Fry), who disapproves of being ‘maid’ of honour; Jack’s ex Amanda (Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto), who makes her dim new beau Chaz (Allan Mustafa) feel, ahem, inadequate; gormless Sidney (Tim Key), chafing intimately under a kilt; blunt (or just rude) Rebecca (Aisling Bea); and Hayley’s drugged-up sort-of-ex Marc (Jack Farthing, rather scary).

Dina is also present, and it keeps on looking like she and Jack might finally (finally!) get together, but so much stuff keeps on getting in the way, from misplaced horse tranquiliser, to a pretentious filmmaker (Paolo Mazzarelli as Vitelli), to Jack’s clichéd English reserve, to that grinding plot turnaround, which transforms this into a vague and annoyingly existentialist echo of Groundhog Day.

Complete with an irksome narrator (Penny Ryder) trying to sound like Judi Dench, it’s the kind of would-be-charmer that will be leapt upon by those frantically seeking something lighthearted. But surely they’d be better off rewatching those other 85917 movies with the word Wedding in the title?

Love Wedding Repeat (M) is now streaming on Netflix