Love Wedding Repeat

This Netflix film is going for Four Weddings status. What were things like before Four Weddings & A Funeral? The costume and situations around a big posh wedding, and posh people swearing, a man in a kilt, and revelations from the lives of the people in the wedding… all are present plus a slightly sweary voice-over at the beginning. There’s an introduction scene with Jack (Sam Claflin) concluding a fantastic holiday where he has had good times with Dina (Olivia Munn), but their farewell is interrupted when Jack is waylaid by an old friend. Several years later Dina is at the wedding of Jack’s sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson).

The film takes a turn from classy wedding comedy to a Judd Apatow type film or maybe The Hangover films, when there’s an ex-boyfriend of the bride on the scene, and he has to be silenced. The method of doing this is to slip a sleeping drug into a champagne glass, but the table names get swapped around by a gang of out of control kids, and so the wrong person gets knocked out.  This creates its own hilarity and a series of dodgy scenes and misunderstandings until everything comes to a head and the voice-over lady (who sounds like Judi Dench but isn’t) reprises what she says at the beginning, and mentions how many different ways there are to seat eight people around a table (and therefore randomly drug one of them).

The maths are: (8-1)! = 5,040 and the film’s title, inspired by Live, Die, Repeat winds back and plays the drug mishap out on another of the eight people around the table. This actually peps up the film considerably, as it’s beginning to look like a slightly gross wedding comedy. The idea is to point up how random it is for two people to meet, and how trying to engineer the perfect moment with an admired guest at a wedding is just as subject to the interruption of random nonsense. There is a fairly tedious subplot involving a male guest’s insecurity about his performance which ultimately drives a pretty guest, played by Freida Pinto, in an entirely different direction.

Against all the odds, this is a fun comedy. The selection of male characters are not immediately likeable although you do want Jack to get the chance to talk to Dina—and the bride and groom are initially out of the way because they don’t come into the story very much, although they’re ultimately important to how the “first glass” storyline plays out. I did like how the bride was a distant figure for much of the film because at a big wedding there’s quite a lot of distance between some guests and the ‘top table’. Eleanor Tomlinson makes beautiful bride and when she has a big role she is very good.

This is a movie with a smart premise that’s almost tied up in an attempt not to be original but to be like other wedding movies. The randomness is the gimmick that the have but they only use it twice, choosing ultimately to go with a conventional ‘grasp every opportunity’ message.  And even if there’s nothing particularly special, the ending is laugh-out loud funny and the whole thing is ultimately satisfying.