To me, you aren't perfect.

Rating: 5/10 (27 December 2019)

'Love, Actually (2003)' is like a slab of aged Stilton on a chocolate-chip cookie ice-cream sandwich: cheesy, saccharine and a tad confused. On-the-nose, sweet-and-savoury metaphors aside, the movie is a mess. It's overly sentimental, relentlessly earnest and hopelessly predictable, conforming to the conventions of its genre a dozen times over. It's no accident that two of its several, somewhat intertwined stories are more fleshed-out than the others; Curtis apparently combined two separate screenplays, one which focused on the prime minister and one which focused on a writer in France. Perhaps these would be good on their own, or even as a two-hander. The problem is that the script is overstuffed and sort of unsure of itself, slipping between subdued, pseudo 'kitchen sink' reality and stylised, 'every man's dream' fantasy. It's the sort of thing in which people propose almost before they've been properly introduced. It all comes together, aside from one story that's left hanging at an oddly downbeat point, in two or three (depending on how you count it) finales, each cheesier than the last. None of it feels like 'real' romance - though, Thompson and Rickman's relationship is rather grounded - and it all seems sort of manipulative. It's not cohesive, clumsily coming together to make for a turbulent time. It's not terrible, however, and there are a couple of laughs - Nighy is a real treat, for example. Still, the end result is sloppy, unrealistic and practically designed to make you go 'aww'. Instead, you kind of just want to go 'yuck'. 5/10