I watched this on DVD last night. It wasn't my idea, but I wasn't completely against it.
Before it I tried to focus my memory on episodes of Blackadder and some of the better scenes in Four Weddings, all of which didn't have Andie MacDowell in them. There was some stuff in there that was genuinely funny.
After a few minutes I could feel any hopes fading fast. For some reason the lead, Domhnall Gleeson, does this uncanny Hugh Grant voice impersonation. This being Curtis the whole bloody film has him waxing lyrical about his life and how everybody should live theirs in VO that sounds exactly like Hugh Grant. All the way through. It was just bloody weird in a film without Grant.
The kid can act. He played a great role in a Black Mirror episode called "Be Right Back". So what's with the Grant impression?
The love interest is an American. Ooh, a film about an awkward English fumbly but well-heeled character falling in love with an American. Jesus, hasn't he done that film about four times already?
It went on with lame jokes and lamer scenes for what seemed hours, days even. Most of what passed for plot appeared written at speed and not even proof read. Written between courses in a high class restaurant while dining with lackeys. That is what it felt like.
It's tiresome, painfully, eyeball rollingly so.
It was like watching a local am-dram group perform a play written by a kindly vicar in his sixties.
I'm being harsh on the am-drammers and the vicars. My apologies. They might have managed a few laughs and a few reasonably original ideas.
At the end of it I began to wonder were all comedies this bad on DVD? I began to question my own taste and reality itself. I felt numb and empty.
Then I remembered Woody Allen and Monty Python and Back To The Future and The Guard and In Bruges. It can be done.
It's got a good cast. Quite what Lindsay Duncan, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander and even briefly Richard E Grant are doing in this appalling waste of everyone's time is utterly beyond me.
After this I knew exactly how Mark Kermode felt after watching Sex and the Cty 2. It was that bad.
LinkAdam Sandler is bad. At least that is widely acknowledged. Quite why this film gets a 7.8 on IMDB is very beyond me. I will never look at its scoring system in the sme way again.
I have some more questions about this film...
Why's everybody rich, or at least well on the way?
Why is everyone is this film so bloody middle class?
Why does Lindsay Duncan dress like the Queen? Even the Queen realises she's a touch on the dowdy side.
Lawyers are sexy? What, accountants too? What are you talking about?
This film is set in London. Why then is everybody white? Oh hang on, near the end I spotted some people who weren't white. In the background. Don't blink or you will miss them.
A struggling playwright lives alone on Abbey Road. Is he related to a Russian Oligarch?
Why do three buskers in the underground sound like have an orchestra and not bother changing their clothes for the tiresome montage?
Come to that, where's all the poor people who aren't lawyers or bankers?
A man gets to time travel and he goes back and mainly rereads books? Dickens three times. You what? For fuck's sake.
Okay Bill Nighy, you've told us Dickens can be funny. Indeed he can, read some out. You know what, that bit about the Roman noses, it's not even vaguely amusing to six year olds who are desperate for more jelly and in a giddy mood. Not even bloody close.
Why do people who've lived most of their life in Cornwall all sound like they went to to Eton then Oxford then RADA? Oooohh aaarrr.
Gosh? An exclamation of surprise is 'gosh'? Is PG Wodehouse back from the dead?
Why bother making a big plot point about time travel only to break it at the end? Doesn't that negate the whole bloody long winded point you were making?
Why would actors in theatre not get prompted by a line prompt when they forget a line? Why would other actors not help them out? This is your plot? Christ.
Why are all the ginger people so socially awkward?
Why are all the women there only as secondary characters to men or kooky or, as the film puts it, look like a prostitute?
Is this the seventies?
Do all have six character biographies and then change the names at the top when you write your scripts?
About Time? About nowt.
About Shite of the highest order. Absolutely shocking. I want my two hours back.
Made Uwe Boll look like Kubrick.
I'm going to have a lie down now.
R