One Wedding And Not Enough Funerals

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Love Wedding Repeat begins with a montage of Rome which is great because I went on holiday there once and I love being reminded of my trip. The film shows the cafe where my friend accidentally spent his entire holiday budget on one lunch, the hotel in which my friend intentionally exposed himself to me after he'd somehow twisted his testicles around within the sack, and the Vatican which is where my friend and I decided to visit to see where all of the paedophiles go to hide. What a beautiful city. Eventually, we focus in on our hero of the film, Sam Claflin, as he struggles to tell his sister's friend Olivia Munn that he fancies her. Or at least I think that's what he was trying to do. It's kind of hard to tell because Claflin's teeth are so fucking white that I began to get a little distracted... Why are they so white? What is he trying to hide by keeping them so insanely clean? Because he's looking at Olivia Munn here like he actually wants to start biting big chunks of meat out of her fucking face. He's really starting to get quite a wrinkly forehead too for someone so young. I watched this film in Ultra Hi-Def 4K which is really not the kindest option for the people on screen. I'm sure Claflin's head is no wrinklier than anybody else's but with the picture as good as it was he looked like Mr Wharf from fucking Star Trek. I think Claflin might actually be going bald too. I'm not a betting man but I'm seriously tempted to put money on him looking like a massive fucking thumb after a particularly long bath within the next five years. I don't mean to body shame him but his character is so lacking in any personality that there really was fuck all else to judge him on.

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We then jump to a few years later and to the wedding day of Claflin's sister. She too has insanely white teeth to the point that watching them both smile was like staring directly into the fucking sun. Her forehead seemed fairly normal though which is why I began to doubt my previous suspicions over Claflin's Klingon origin. Olivia Munn has also been invited to this wedding which means that, having failed to tell her how he feels about her in Rome, Claflin now has one more chance to do it here. For some reason...? Do these people not have social media? It's not the fucking 1980's anymore where the only way to meet somebody was to just walk in their general direction and hope that they were doing the same toward you. You now can just send somebody a message and chat online until you're able to meet up again. If this film had any sense of real-life then by the time of the wedding, Munn would have seen so many pictures of Claflin's dick that it'd be burnt onto her retinas like the dollar signs in Scrooge Mc-fucking-Duck's eyes. So Claflin's sister has to get through her wedding without it being ruined and Claflin either wants to tell Munn that he likes her or that he wants to kill and eat her. Even by the end, I wasn't entirely sure which it was although I think it's fair to say that he's likely fantasised about having her spit-roasted one way or the other. The film is a comedy too, by the way. Did I mention that? This movie really wants to look like a Richard Curtis movie but without ever understanding the charm of what gives his rom-coms such personality. Love Wedding Repeat is like Buffalo Bill standing at the top of the well as Richard Curtis's back catalogue is told to “rub the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again”. 

Perhaps the biggest issue though is in just how unfunny and forced all of the 'comedy set-pieces' feel. At one point a sort of ex-of-the-bride turns up at the wedding off his tits on drugs and uninvited. Rather than telling him to get fucked, the bride concocts a plan to drug the unwanted wedding crasher and have him dragged away by her brother as he's unconscious whilst simultaneously trying to maintain to her questioning future husband that he's actually just an old friend. I don't know why she couldn't tell the truth about him here? The wedding is the most expensive and lavish thing that I have ever seen but at no point is it explained how the happy couple is funding it. I can only conclude that they're all evil billionaires, and like all evil billionaires they will therefore likely have some connection to the child sex industry. In which case I'd argue that if they can have Jeffery Epstein killed then they can certainly get this one mad junkie removed from their special day too. The fact that the bride jumped so quickly to the idea of drugging her ex suggests to me that Claflin really might actually be a psychopath with both him and his sister likely inheriting their twisted world view from one of their equally damaged parents. They actually try to cram in a sentimental moment earlier on in the film when it's revealed that their father has sadly passed away and so isn't able to be there on the day to give away his daughter. I don't remember if Claflin or his sister reveal exactly what happened to their father but I suspect that he's splayed open and rotting next to the chainsaw that they fucking killed him with. 

There's another moment in which the bride's 'hilariously' male Maid of Honour is told on the day that he's expected to do a speech having had nobody give him any warning about it beforehand. Again this wedding looks like it cost so much money that if donated to the right charity its budget could have funded enough research to cure cancer. Not only that but the day seems to have been choreographed by androids who are preprogrammed to know exactly how the day should plan out. With so much at stake do you really think they'd have forgotten to check that their Maid of Honour knew that he was expected to do a speech? That's like watching that one dickhead answer in English to the Nazis at the end of The Great Escape. So much planning has gone into this that I'm surprised that there wasn't a red dot on everyone's forehead as snipers on the roofs outside make sure that nobody steps out of place for fear of having their fucking brains blown out. Do you remember that the bride was planning to drug her ex to get rid of him too? Who do you think gets drugged by mistake? Because by the time it came for him to do his speech, watching that Maid Of Honour really, really struggle to stay awake was arguably the most relatable moment of the fucking movie for me. It's pretty much at this point when we're about an hour into the things that something kind of strange happens too. Just as the wedding day gets completely fucked up a random fucking voice-over chimes in and ponders what might have happened if things had played out differently. We then see the last 30 minutes again but if the writers had gone in a slightly different direction... Essentially the third act of this piece of shit movie is just an alternative draft of the second act and then it just fucking ends. What the fuck? 

From memory, I don't remember this dimensional slip having been built into the movie before it happened about two-thirds of the way through. Imagine Sliding Doors if the door had actually gotten jammed for the first sixty minutes of the movie causing it all play out in a conventionally linear way until the writers ran out of ideas and were forced to panic-smack the 'gimmick' button. The voice of the woman providing the voice-over kind of bugged me initially too because I couldn't quite place who it was. Then it hit me that of course, it was Judi Dench! Proud of having been able to work it out I sauntered over to IMDB to confirm my deduction only to discover that it was actually the voice of a woman called Penny Ryder. But who is Penny Ryder I hear you ask? Well according to her profile she's the personal assistant and occasional stand-in to Judi fucking Dench. I mean, what is going on here? Did Dench just decide to fuck this one off after accepting the part and so sent her personal prison-bitch to do it instead? Or did the production run out of money and start trying to find a cheaper way to rip-off Judi Dench after it had finished stitching together its Richard Curtis flesh-dress? As somebody pointed out to me, if that first hour is a rip-off of Richard Curtis then by repeating itself that final thirty minutes is actually a rip-off of a Richard Curtis rip-off. But as Love Wedding Repeat replays itself I guess you might be wondering what the point of this final half-hours 'what if' scenario might be? Well, don't worry because the film literally has a character explain its central theme that, “everything is down to chance and life is about grabbing those chances when they come along”. Which again not only ignores the conveniences of social media but I'm pretty sure is the mantra of a fucking sex offender. I think the movie builds to what it believes to be a happy ending but the only truly happy ending would be if it had gone back in time the full ninety minutes and we could have chosen not to fucking watch instead. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.