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The Love Punch

Director: Joel Hopkins

Writer: Joel Hopkins

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie

Runtime: 94 minutes

Certification: 12A

Rating: 2/5

There is a line of dialogue that is rather unwisely repeated on a regular basis in The Love Punch. The film is quite insistent on telling the audience that a certain plan the characters come up with is “crazy, daft, stupid, but brilliant”. Aside from “brilliant”, The Love Punch quite comfortably ticks the rest of the boxes: crazy, daft and stupid.

A potentially effective screwball setup quickly goes down the drain with the film trying too hard, having far too much utter nonsense, and not quite being funny enough despite contributions from plenty of English talent. We open with an obvious nod to the “shaken not stirred” motif of James Bond, clearly an homage to its leading man; Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan. Richard (Brosnan) and his ex-wife Kate (Emma Thompson) are on civil(ish) terms in that they share a daughter and don’t necessarily try to kill each other every time they run into one another. A bad investment deal cheats them out of their secure retirement savings, and the only way to rightfully take back what is theirs, is to travel to Paris, France, crash a posh wedding, and steal an extremely rare diamond then sell it for millions. The details, as you might expect, are never too important, given just how many holes there are here in the first place.

Perhaps something like this could have worked on a goofy, over-the-top French adaptation. Here the Brit actors give it their all. And the chemistry between the suave, relaxed Brosnan goes hand-in-hand with the more neurotic, louder Thompson. Not particularly imaginative ways of developing its characters, but between the two there are very few moments of humour that mostly amount to chuckles at most.

Of course the big gag factor here is that they’re old and their bodies aren’t quite what they used to be. They are faced with a daunting challenge of having to do a lot of physical work. “Old people doing exciting things” seems to be a popular concept that gives room for veteran actors and actresses to let looseand have fun. Would we have seen Dame Helen Mirren waving around a machine gun if “Red” had not happened? Instead we are treated to a very dull car chase, a near-death experience that is nullified through something so anti-climatic, and the four thespians involved doing a slow-motion walk in their sunglasses, strutting their stuff, in a sequence that painfully goes on for too long.

Yes, there are four of them in this gang. Richard and Kate’s married best friends Jerry (Timothy Spall) and Penelope (Celia Imrie) get on board with this “crazy, daft, stupid, but brilliant” plan. Various mishaps happen along the way, none of them exciting or funny, a lot of it tedious and mind-numbingly boring.

When the film is failing utterly at trying to crack a few jokes, it sets out to become quite the relationship counsellor, trying to place into the script various monologues about what love is all about and how long-lasting relationships work. The fact that Richard and Kate are divorced, and are thrown into this premise, should already give you lots of hints as to what the writers are desperately getting at, somewhat of a better-late-than-never type of reunion; and such predictability is fine, although the way the film goes about bringing the two back together is nothing short of cringe-worthy at best.

It is such a waste of a talented cast: even with Spall’s and Imrie’s contributions, the gags turn flat. That goes to show how much of a problem the script has in landing a single plausible joke. The heist itself is hugely unremarkable, and when things briefly take a turn for the more serious, even that shift in tone is not enough to save the film from having one disastrous thing happen one right after the other.

There are some nice sweeping shots of France. The ocean, the countryside, the nature; everything looks like something out of a fancy postcard, and the aerial shots do have a way of trying to tempt a wave of potential summer holiday-goers. But a 94-minute film is far too long to work purely as an expensive travel destination advert, and even though the runtime is clearly no way near close to being something that is considered long, with _The Love Punch _that feels like an eternity for sure.

A farcial comedy can work. Plenty of examples in the past have shown that. But the pure idiocy with which the film approaches its storytelling is insulting to those having to sit through it. There is a penis joke that works. Yes, one of very few good moments that bumps this up from a one-star rating to two.