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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 31 December 2013
This article is a review of LOVE PUNCH.
Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. (For more information, click here.)
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“You’re going to be so bored,” Kate Jones (Emma Thompson) to Richard Jones (Pierce Brosnan)
Brosnan was Bond and Thomas Crown, Thompson has two Oscars, what are they doing starring in such an awkward mess? In the mould of romantic-caper CHARADE (1963), charm-wit-intelligence are absent from LOVE PUNCH. Even supporting players Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie can’t enliven a movie dead on arrival. The foursome applies paddles to kick-start the heart; and when we look in the chest cavity to see why it does not beat, find the ticker absent and the body sans guts or brains too.
On paper, a divorced couple, who banter flirtily (read bicker artlessly), forced to team up to right a wrong might have had an ADAM’S RIB frisson. 1940s HIS GIRL FRIDAY/THE PHILADELPHIA STORY dialogue is crucially absent. Thompson and Brosnan are not magicians, coming a cropper without a decent script (see the former in SAVING MR BANKS and the latter in DIE ANOTHER DAY for further examples).
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Opening on a wedding, Kate and Richard both guests, we find them winding each other up. Dialled to over-acting, our initiation is a leaden display. Richard is a week away from retirement. Kate talks of her romantic dream – groan – do you wonder if it will be fulfilled? Their youngest daughter (Tuppence Middleton) is heading to university. After send off, a news report is highlighted on a $10 million diamond sold to an anonymous buyer. Meanwhile Richard’s business, Culco Engineering, has been placed in receivership, by parent company Lexon, screwing over the employee pension fund. Kate and Richard’s annuities are lost too. Do you think the diamond and the douchebag head of Lexon, Vincent Garde (Patrice Cols), are connected?
“I run a lot of companies into the ground; which one?” Garde spits at our intrepid duo on confronting him at the Paris headquarters. A shambolically orchestrated car chase is thrown into the mix. RONIN (1998) it isn’t. Any sense of political/social commentary and realism is chucked, on the formulation of the vigilante plan to steal the diamond as recompense/revenge. A trip to a fortified castle on the Côte d'Azur, where Garde is marrying a younger beauty (Louise Bourgoin – THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC), is the finale locale. Two weddings bookend one movie. Oh yeah, neighbourhood pals Jerry (Spall) and Penelope (Imrie) just turn up in France to aid vengeance, and romantic reconciliation between the leads. The cast deserve better. At least there’s a 007 gag (would be rude not to include one).
Fans of THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL and QUARTET looking for an unchallenging divertissement, might, just might, get a kick out of this wish-fulfilment ‘comedy’ of aging and wrong righting.
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