Love Wedding Repeat
Director: Dean Craig
Writer: Dean Craig
Remake of: Plan de table
Cast: Sam Claflin, Olivia Munn, Freida Pinto, Eleanor Tomlinson, Joel Fry, Jack Farthing, Tim Key, Allan Mustafa, Aisling Bea, Paolo Mazzarelli
Seen on: 18.4.2020

Plot:
Jack (Sam Claflin) and Dina (Olivia Munn) had a moment years ago, but nothing more ever came of it. Now Jack is back in Italy for his sister Hayley’s (Eleanor Tomlinson) wedding and not only is Dina there, too, but so is Jack’s still angry ex Amanda (Freida Pinto) with her new boyfriend Chaz (Allan Mustafa) and Marc (Jack Farthing) has crashed the wedding to tell Hayley that they should be together. It’s up to Jack to make sure that things don’t go wrong. But sometimes small things like seating arrangements can make all the difference – and so there are a couple of versions to the story.

Love Wedding Repeat is a complete disappointment, unfortunately. There’s simultaneously too much going on and too little. Neither the comedy works, nor the multiple versions.

I haven’t seen the French film this is based on, but I can only hope that it works better than this one here. Because the idea is good. The “what if”s should be enough to make the film interesting at least and with Claflin and Munn in the lead, you’d think that we’d be all set. But unfortunately, it isn’t so.

The film’s biggest problem is that it has too many players, too many balls up in the air. You’d need more time to spend with each of them to care more about them. But then you’d have even less times for the multiple versions of how the wedding day goes down – the central conceit and draw of the film in the first place. And the film already does itself the disservice of condensing most of those versions into a two-minute montage. Ultimately we get to see two different versions.

So, what we get here is a film that cheats you out of its major selling point to focus on too many characters you don’t give a damn about. In its course, it criminally wastes Freida Pinto and somehow manages to remove almost all the charme from Sam Claflin (how that is possible is beyond me). There are only a couple of moments where the movie gives him (and Munn) enough breathing space that they actually get to show that they are charming, charismatic, beautiful people one is usually very interested in watching.

All this means that the film left me mostly annoyed. It feels like a squandered opportunity in pretty much every regard, except that it is very pretty to look at, if you like glamorous weddings at least.

Summarizing: Skip it.