Miss Emma Thompson - gold amongst the dross.....

Rating: 4/10 (10 November 2005)

If you think Hugh Grant is the greatest light comedian since Cary Grant you may be able to watch his performance as the Prime Minister through slightly open fingers.If you think having a sprinkling of thespians spread thinly amongst the 2nd rate TV actors is "fun" and not patronising,and if you think smug trustafarians happily send their "kids" to bog standard comprehensive schools then you are the sort of person at whom "Love actually" is aimed.
Martine McCutcheon,so well-scrubbed she almost gleams,seems surprised to be in this movie,as well she might.She must have got a really good agent. The story line involving her,Hugh Grant and a Clintonesque US president(whatever his other faults,G.W.Bush couldn't be said to be a ladies man) is absolutely ludicrous,and Grant's speech at the Press Conference is nearly as nauseating as his "amusing" best man's speech in "Four Weddings and a Funeral". The use of the music couldn't be more blatantly manipulative and unsubtle.If someone had appeared on the screen with a card marked "Cry now" I wouldn't have been surprised.Only Miss Emma Thompson as a betrayed wife is the least bit believable,a vein of gold amongst the dross. Mr Neeson,as the stepfather to a precocious bad-mannered little curly top,looks as though he has remembered a subsequent,rather more important engagement and is just looking for an excuse to slip away. That rather anonymous chap from "The Office" is,er,rather anonymous in a particularly silly episode about two porn movie stand-ins finding love whilst pretending to have sex.. Colin Firth was not born to play the author falling in love with his Portuguese housekeeper,nor indeed any other comedy part. Rowan Atkinson is almost as bad as he would later be in "Johnny English" and he can't really need the money,can he? I will save the blushes of the other actors by drawing a veil over their performances. So - obviously - I didn't think a lot of it.I looked for some sign of wit,originality or even truth (heaven help me) in "Love actually" and Miss Thompson excepted,found none. I don't mind being manipulated by a movie - after all,that's what they do - but I don't want my intelligence being insulted at the same time.