The Love Punch review
This is bad. This is really, really dreadful. In fact, if the editor allowed it I would type this entire review in capital letters to emphasise the fact that I am shouting with rage. I actually had to ask the movie attendant to unfurl my fists when leaving the cinema as I had curled them into tight balls of frustration.
The Love Punch is an attempt at a well-worn Hollywood story. We are introduced in the opening scene to our lead characters. Middle aged, yet still rather attractive divorced couple, (Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan) who bump into each other at some sort of wedding (their shared relationship to the newly wedded pair is not referenced, preempting a complete lack of regard for the finer details that pervades the entire film).
Both still appear to fancy one other. Thompson who is quite obviously scorned hides her anguish expertly with a sarcastic tone and a great hair cut. Alongside this unimaginative scenario, the movie rather feebly throws in a hefty amount of action and it is all a bit of an abysmal mess.
Brosnan or ‘Mr. Jones’ (how original), is suddenly faced with some drastic news. On the cusp of retirement, he discovers that his company has been bought, sold and leeched of all of its funds. This means that his, his ex-wife’s and all of his employees’ pensions are now gone.
Pierce also seems to have had had some sort of dreadful amnesia since his days as a world class spy, so he consults his wife who ingeniously uses the internet to find out the name of the company he apparently had no prior knowledge of.
They discover that the company’s headquarters are based in Paris and what should one do when their financial future hangs in the balance? Why, take a trip to Paris together, of course. On arrival, they sneak into the headquarters with incredible ease and run in an overly dramatic fashion into the office of the company’s CEO (Laurent Lafitte, complete with evil laugh). They shout a bit and tell him how mean he is and then they ask him to give their money back. Shockingly, this does not work.
Now the only course of action is to become really dodgy spies. They hatch an ill-thought out and highly illegal plan to rob a ten million dollar diamond that Kruger has recently bought his fiancé.
In order to do this they simply have to catch a train to the South of France where the wedding is taking place. To do this they will need the help of their dowdy neighbours back in England (Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie) who fly over immediately, as they clearly have nothing better to be doing with their time. Fortunately they all know how to scuba dive and abseil, so that makes things easy and they even manage to enjoy a few glasses of vino and grab the odd terrace brunch.
Luckily, Emma Thompson or ‘Mrs. Jones’ is really sound and very good at giving advise about men, so she manages to befriend Mr. Kruger’s beautiful fiancé (Louise Bourgoin) and well, I won’t spoil the rest for you. But I imagine my glowing depiction of the whole movie has you anxiously anticipating how it will all pan out for these scamps.
Thompson and Brosnan have stepped into could what could be perceived as rather endearing roles. In fairness, they do achieve this in some form. By the end of the movie I didn’t hate them, I simply hated the people who were lazy enough to make this film.
It appears as though a group of screenwriters were given a brief to write a romantic comedy about a middle aged, British couple. Then they went out and got really, massively drunk and were too hung-over to think of anything thoughtful or clever to write so they just robbed bits of every bad movie ever made and cobbled it together and hoped that Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan would give the movie some small level of legitimacy.
To me this film is very lazy and the fact that it was shot on location in Paris and in the South of France annoys me when I think that such an expense went into making such a flimsy production. Now, please excuse me while I go and rant at some other innocent and unsuspecting people.
