The Grand Seduction
Director: Don McKellar
Writer: Michael Dowse, Ken Scott
Remake of: La grande séduction
Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Brendan Gleeson, Liane Balaban, Gordon Pinsent

Plot:
Tickle Head is a small village in Newfoundland, in desperate need of jobs and money. They are promised a new factory – but it’s only possible if they have a resident doctor in the village. As fate would have it, there’s Dr. Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) who gets blackmailed into doing a month of work in Tickle Head. That is one month Murray (Brendan Gleeson) and with him the entire village plan on using to make Lewis fall in love with their village – and if that means that everybody learns how to play cricket, everybody learns how to play cricket.

The Grand Seduction was a charming little film that was utterly predictable and brought nothing really new to the table, but executed tried and tested tropes flawlessly. That makes it basically the perfect rainy Sunday afternoon movie.

I have to admit that at first I was a little confused as to the setting of the film. Maybe because Brendan Gleeson is so completely Irish to me, or maybe because he just decided to talk with an Irish accent but I was constantly wondering whether we were in Ireland or Newfoundland. But that is only a minor thing and nothing that concerned me much. It’s also the only thing I actually had to think about while watching the film.

The rest of it is completely clear – clear about how the story will progress, clear about everyone’s intentions, clear about the morals of it. And mostly that works just perfectly fine and more often than not, I found myself smiling.

Some things didn’t sit so well with me. The romantic subplot was underdeveloped and was just there because a film like this needs romance, not because it had much relevance to anything else. I thought that [SPOILERS] the infidelity of the original girlfriend was just a little too convenient [/SPOILERS]. I also kept wondering about the freaking dog that Lewis loves so much but that never actually appears (oh, I guess there was a second triviality that kept my mind occupied while watching). Is it abandoned in the end?

But other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. It was sweet, fun, made time pass quickly and Taylor Kitsch never looked as good. If you don’t expect more, you’ll be happy with it.

Summarizing: Sweet fun you don’t need to think about.