Prefer your romcom with extra cheese? Then this one’s for you...
Marry Me (12A, 112 mins)
Verdict: Formulaic romcom
Death On The Nile (12A, 127 mins)
Verdict: Goes totally overboard
As February’s big date night bears down on us like a velvet steamroller, Marry Me might be the best option for an evening at the pictures with your beloved . . . as long as you don’t mind a romcom as predictable and formulaic as the pre-printed sentiment in a cheesy Valentine’s card.
The plot has thumping echoes of Notting Hill (1999) and fainter ones of roman Holiday (1953) as a pop superstar, Kat Valdez (Jennifer Lopez), impulsively marries a complete stranger, divorced maths teacher Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson). The pair must then navigate the vast differences in their respective lifestyles before finding (or not finding, I’m giving nothing away) they love each other for who, not what, they are.
and how, you might ask, did they arrive at such a peculiar state of affairs? Well, Marry Me is also the title of Kat’s latest hit, which she performs with her fiancé and fellow Latino superstar, bastian. He is played in his feature-film acting debut by Colombian ‘pop sensation’ (I’m reading from the press notes) Maluma, who for the record is 28. J-Lo is 52. Does anyone remark on this very considerable age gap? No, they do not. It’s that kind of movie.
anyway, Kat and bastian have become a world-famous double act, leading to the social media stunt of the year, their onstage wedding at a concert in New york City. Just before they tie the knot, however, someone shows Kat a video of bastian snogging her assistant. Distraught, she promptly does what anyone would do in such circumstances and calls up a random bloke from the audience to get hitched to instead.
This is Charlie, an amiable cove who’s only there because his best friend (sarah silverman) and 12-year-old daughter (Chloe Coleman) are huge Kat-and-bastian fans. but crucially, he is haplessly holding a ‘Marry Me’ placard that has been thrust into his hands. and so, with that rather magnificent set of contrivances, a notary steps forward to sanctify the union between Kat and Charlie. ‘Do you, some guy, take Kat, to be your lawfully wedded wife . . .’
That’s the highly implausible set-up, and from there the rest of the narrative faithfully follows the text of a beginner’s Guide To Writing romcoms, including all the cliches that a film like this demands: the cutesy little girl, the wisecracking pal and the harassed british manager with the classic british name (Collin, played by John bradley, who fares slightly better than he did in last week’s disaster, Moonfall).
Marry Me is directed by Kat Coiro, whose credits are mostly in TV and it shows: the film is nicely paced and slickly packaged, and the ever-engaging Lopez and Wilson just about make up for the eye-rollingly predictable plot trajectory.
sadly, the same cannot be said for the cast of Death On The Nile, stuck in what I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! might look like, had it been devised by agatha Christie.
The film is directed by Kenneth branagh, who also plays Hercule Poirot. I don’t suppose anything can spoil his week, given all the Oscar nominations his autobiographical film belfast has garnered. but actually it’s interesting to compare the two pictures: one so commendably economical, with a running time of just over an hour and a half; the other so bloated, as, in the time-honoured fashion of Christie adaptations, the body count mounts and the suspects get shiftier.
Like the 1978 version with Peter ustinov, branagh’s Death On The
Nile is sumptuous to look at. but it feels so familiar that a better title might have been Death Warmed up On The Nile.
In fairness, branagh uses characters played by sophie Okonedo and Letitia Wright to introduce the taint of racism, while a strange black-and-white pre-titles sequence explains how Poirot came to acquire his extravagant facial hair. but otherwise we’ve seen all this before: a starry cast, a few mysterious deaths, gorgeous production values, and a reveal that feels as whiskery as the great detective’s moustache.
Maybe he should have reinterpreted Christie’s 1937 novel as a spoof; that would have made more sense of casting Dawn French, Jennifer saunders and russell brand as passengers on the ss Karnak as it steams past the pyramids, not to mention the curious choice of Israeli star Gal Gadot. bizarrely, she plays beautiful heiress Linnet ridgeway, an english rose for whom english is unaccountably a second language, and whose honeymoon with dishy new husband simon
Doyle (armie Hammer) turns alarmingly murderous.
as the Karnak steams on regardless, one of the vital clues goes overboard, accompanied by quite a bit of the acting, with not even annette bening above a spot of scenery-chewing.
still, Death On The Nile might yet yield gold at the box office. branagh’s Murder On The Orient express (2017) did well, even though that wasn’t very good, either. and there, finally, is the decisive answer to the greatest riddle of all; not whodunnit, but why make it?
A longer review of Death on The nile ran in Tuesday’s paper.