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. Link

Adam 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

So would you recommend it... or what?

Quoted from Dusty So would you recommend it... or what?

Well, it wasn't as bad as Love Actually.

Quoted from rendevous Well, it wasn't as bad as Love Actually.

Things rarely are

Quoted from rendevous Made Uwe Boll look like Kubrick.

Wow.  That says it all, doesn't it?  

The high rating may be explained by the people who gave it a pass for being a RomCom. Some people can overlook faults when a movie manipulates them in a sensible way (sometimes very predictably). I confess I haven't watched. I know the plot but the trailer turn me off immediately.  Why is that time-travel movies only focus in how the character can change something in his life? Being fair, most of the time these are life or death situations: Back to the Future, Buterfly Effect, Looper, The Time Machine (2002). But is rare to find a movie where the main plan is to do a better future for the world (except maybe 12 Monkeys and Terminator).  In this movie the main character discovers he can travel back in time and what does his do? He uses it to impress a girl. Because that's what everyone would do, right? I know that latter in the movie he does more meaningful things but only because affect him. I guess is just anither divisive movie.

Quoted from Julian He uses it to impress a girl. Because that's what everyone would do, right? I know that latter in the movie he does more meaningful things but only because affect him. I guess is just anither divisive movie.

Were you in a rush, Julian?

Apologies for arguing, but this is on the internet and if I don't argue it will be much less fun for everyone, so... Later in the movie he does things to improve other people's lives only to find they affect his adversely, so he goes farther back to fix things for the better of everyone. I think that's a fair statement. I don't think he's quite as selfish as you suggest. If he was it might have been slightly more interesting.

I may seem like I'm digging like my own hole here, but there's plenty of mess and half-arsedness already in About Two Hours of Root Canal.

Bring Looper and Terminator into this doesn't help. It's like talking about Da Vinci and Raphael in relation to McDonalds ads.

The main plot of a guy going back in time to change things without a machine isn't too bad in itself. But he doesn't even really bother with it. They have to go to a small dark place. So, after a few goes he goes into a well lit toilet in a posh restaurant. Now, if he took a bulb out I could go with it, but he doesn't. Fecking lazy arse writing. While trying to go along with this they couldn't be bothered. So why the fecking hell should a viewer?

A pitch black scene in a restaurant of blind waiters? Yeah, fucking fantastic visual treat. Especially with all that dialogue that wouldn't pass muster in a student uni play.

Watching this film was like being in a taxi with a flat tyre which slowed down for green lights and stopped every few minutes for a rest. Then the driver farts for a while.

This type of story was done successfully in Midnight In Paris.
Less so in The Time Traveller's Wife.

I know people who do really like Love, Actually. Obviously I try avoid them like the plague. But for each their own.

I'm sure there are people who like About Arse too. As a wise man once said, Michael Crichton I think, "it's only a movie".

I think the problem is that movies can be wonderful, up there with the finest pieces of art. Or down there with really horrible cack like bad ads and the like.

R

Finally, a movie about the struggles facing beautiful rich white people!

Rendevous has more or less said it all, so I won't heap too much additional hate on here, but I guess I'd just like to say that I'd rather be pretty much anywhere in time than the time where I'm watching About Time, and that if Frodo had had the choice of throwing the One Ring or the last copy of this movie into the fires of Mount Doom, Middle Earth woulda been fucked.