Terrible

Rating: 1/10 (24 March 2005)

This is one of the worst British films ever made and I'm staggered it has such a good rating here - no accounting for taste I guess. Why is it so bad? It's cloyingly sentimental to the point of being vomit-inducing: the characters are all middle-class and boring, wrapped up in their own self-obsessed tedium. London is re-imagined as a heavenly place which it isn't. Hugh Grant plays himself yet again - ah the tedium. The jokes are unfunny. The direction is patronizing and condescending. It's also too ambitious for its own good. Director Richard Curtis has attempted (attempted being the operative word) a romantic comedy that apes the multi-narrative structure of Altman's Short Cuts. It fails miserably to weave the stories together as Altman did; instead some stories such as the Laura Linney one remain unresolved as if they don't matter to the overall naffness of this terrifyingly awful film. The musical segments are also cringe-inducingly bad. I wish Curtis would have shown some restraint.