Pass the champagne — out of reach of the ill-fated newlyweds Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) in the comedy “Love Wedding Repeat,” streaming on Netflix. The couple’s reception at an Italian villa becomes a drunken, disastrous lab experiment carried out by an unseen oracle (Penny Ryder) who wants to prove that happily-ever-after is merely a game of chance.
Table four is where the bride (a charming redhead with a wide smile that shifts from phony to petrified) has quarantined her English-speaking friends: one shiftless male maid-of-honor, two vengeful exes and three lovelorn fools. One of those includes Hayley’s brother Jack (Sam Claflin), haplessly mooning over his dream girl (Olivia Munn), an American war journalist who gets a few muttered zingers, but is otherwise stuck acting, well, dreamy. This volatile cocktail is given one more ingredient — a glass of bubbly spiked with tranquilizers — and a twist. Devilish children have randomly rearranged the seating cards so the poisoner, Jack, isn’t sure who has the sleeping potion until they’ve passed out on their plate.
Naturally, the nuptials climax in blood and tears. Unnaturally, however, the film rewinds to test whether the evening might improve if a different guzzler became the Sleeping Bungler. It’s a clever conceit based on the 2012 French film “Plan de Table,” here reduced to a hasty montage of possibilities and one other story line played out in full, accompanied by a stately classical score to balance the mayhem.
With a few more slammed doors, the action-packed script could be a passable British farce. Alas, the director and screenwriter Dean Craig instead favors British chagrin plus an overdose of noblesse disdain, which is well-executed by the groom’s silent, suffering grandmother (Giusi Merli). Freida Pinto, however, playing Jack’s loathsome ex, appears to have been instructed to recoil until her head is a foot behind her shoulders.
Craig’s comic delivery belabors gags that should run light on their feet. Rather than serving up a variety of zingers, the movie settles for one joke per character, repeated endlessly. A case in point: the jealous boyfriend (Allan Mustafa) who’s fixated on that male measurement. Instead, the best bits of comedy come from physical slapstick. Jack Farthing, playing a coked-out schoolyard crush hellbent on sabotaging Hayley’s marriage, stumbles into the movie like a marionette missing most of his strings, while Joel Fry, as her wastrel best friend, is somehow able to suck his eyeballs into his skull. Cheers to that.
Love Wedding Repeat
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
