pants actually

Rating: 1/10 (23 November 2003)

There are directors who can hold together a film containing several narratives (Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Ron Howard, to name but three) but Richard Curtis fails miserably. There's a good film in there somewhere struggling to get out but Richard Curtis the director has employed Richard Curtis as writer and his partner Emma Freud as script editor, so there's no one to tell him that actually so many strands don't work. The Hugh Grant/Martine McCutcheon story is charming if implausible, but didn't Rob Reiner do it so much better in The American President? And Curtis seems convinced that swearing itself is funny. The Colin Firth story works much better and provides the film's best laughs. Emma Thompson is brilliant as the wife discovering her husband is at least contemplating an affair, but Alan Rickman isn't convincing. Surely such an intelligent man wouldn't really be interested in an affair with the cheap as chips office girl. Keira Knightley is beautiful and charming in the touching segment involving a nicely understated performance from Andrew Lincoln as the doting unspoken admirer. Bill Nighy camps it up in fine style as the ageing rocker, but the comedy is laid on with a trowel. The worst strands of the film involve the bereaved Liam Neeson and his stepson - the airport scene is particularly emetic, the out-of-place simulated sex scenes featuring Martin Freeman and the ludicrous section that implies that any English nerd would be viewed as a sex god in America.