Love Wedding Repeat: Silly Romcom Checks the Predictable Boxes But Falls Flat

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C-plus

If you’ve been missing mumbly, fumbly, slightly naughty but deeply romantic English romcoms, you could use Love Wedding Repeat as a temporary placeholder. Steeped in the juices of romcom maestro Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually), the film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.

Also, the insertion of a Sliding Doors-type surreal twist in the middle of the plot might lead you to deep thoughts, like “What if everything went wrong and then everything went right?” Or, as the anonymous narrator at the film’s beginning (it sounds like Dame Judi Dench) explains, sometimes Fate gives you a “massive kick in the balls.”

While you’re contemplating what that that feels like, we’re introduced to Hugh Grant substitute, Sam Claflin (Me Before You) as the terribly shy Jack who falls for gorgeous American journalist, Dina (Olivia Munn), who spends her time in “war-torn hell holes.” Sam fails to close the deal, then loses contact for the next three years.

Jack and Dina reunite when his sister, Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) is about to tie the knot with Italian beau Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) in a Roman villa. There’s a group of about 10 characters who come and go around their table, amidst all the mishaps that will definitely happen after the bride announces “Nothing could spoil this day!”

The muddle-makers include Hayley’s moderately louche male “maid of honour,” aspiring actor Bryan (Joel Fry), Jack’s narcissistic ex-girlfriend Amanda (Freida Pinto), and her sexually insecure boyfriend, Chaz (Allan Mustafa), the kilt-wearing bore Sidney (Tim Key), and the unfiltered Rebecca (not enough of the Irish actress, Aisling Bea, who co-starred with Paul Rudd in the limited series, Living With Yourself).

Things get complicated and a bit too silly when the bride’s former bad boyfriend, Marc (Jack Farthing) high on coke, shows up unannounced to declare his love for her. Then they get more complicated and sillier when Jack is assigned to give the interloper a knockout dose in his champagne to get him out of the way.

Love Wedding Repeat is adapted from a 2012 French film, Plan de Table (Seating Plan), and involves some naughty children switching the place cards at Jack’s table, so Jack gets seated next to his nasty ex, and, of course, the wrong person gets the knock-out drink. The Sliding Doors part comes when we see (in a quick montage) a bunch of the different ways eight people could be seated around the same table, before focusing on one that leads to a happy ending.

Math aside, Love Wedding Repeat begins to feel like work, partly because the actors are forced to labour so hard to be outrageous, annoying, and drunk. While we never lose the sense that the two leads are essentially ciphers, Claflin remains bashfully likeable and Munn gives a pleasant unforced performance, while wearing a pretty pale green frock. It’s enough of an amusement, or perhaps a counterirritant, that you may barely think of more weighty things.

Love Wedding Repeat. Directed and written by Dean Craig. Starring Sam Claflin, Olivia Munn, Freida Pinto, Eleanor Tomlinson, Joel Fry, Jack Farthing, Tim Key, Allan Mustafa and Aisling Bea.