LIKE FATHER
★★
NETFLIX OUT 3 AUGUST
DIRECTOR Lauren Miller Rogen CAST Kristen Bell, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Rogen
PLOT After being left at the altar on her wedding day, workaholic advertising executive Rachel (Bell) drunkenly agrees to go on her cruise ship honeymoon with her estranged father Harry (Grammer) instead. Can they reconnect — and win the karaoke competition?
LIKE FATHER IS a romantic comedy without any romance. That’s deliberate — this is a story of familial love, told in the romcom template. The problem, perhaps, is that there’s not quite enough comedy, either.
It’s not as if the film doesn’t boast a healthy line-up of comic talent. Our two leads are established pros, with former sitcom king Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) sparring ably against current sitcom queen Kristen Bell (The Good Place). Plus, it has the might of a comedy power couple in the form of Lauren Miller Rogen (who writes and directs) and her husband Seth (who stars in a knowingly against-type supporting role as a school teacher who has never smoked weed). But their strengths aren’t utilised.
Miller Rogen’s script scurries enthusiastically down the romcom path, leaning on many of the genre’s wornthrough staples — the establishing opening shots of the Manhattan skyline, the karaoke competition, even the 11th-hour airport dash. But in place of the romance is a broken relationship between a father and daughter who haven’t spoken in 25 years, using a runaway groom as a catalyst for a reconnection.
Rachel (Bell) is career-driven to a fault, permanently glued to her phone, unable to see beyond securing that next big client; Harry (Grammer) is gentle, understanding and warm, but with an emotional backstory. She’s the ice queen, he’s the defroster. It’s a classic set-up, if not exactly thunderingly original. But what’s striking is how earnest it all is — it’s far more interested in the soapy family dynamics than hammering jokes down your throat. It’s like the anti-seinfeld — lots of hugging, lots of learning.
The garish horrors of cruise ships, with their abundance of surf simulators, sugary cocktails and over-friendly old people could easily be mined for farce, but even here the film prefers to use a tender, punch-pulled touch. A colourful collection of best-friend supporting characters (another romcom trope) are gentle stereotypes rather than any sort of comic relief.
Instead, the thrust of the narrative focuses on Harry and Rachel resolving their differences, and Rachel learning a very basic moral lesson about valuing family over work. Once that all gets sorted out — relatively early in the running time — the tension dissipates. Save for a couple of emotional twists and tearful revelations, it turns into a jolly holiday home video crossed with a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line infomercial.
The whole thing is so light that it billows past like a cloud, impossible to hate, but hardly offering any reason to fall in love with it, either. It’s exactly the sort of nice, undemanding fare you could fall asleep to on a plane — or, for that matter, a cruise ship. JOHN NUGENT
VERDICT Sweet, but very slight, Like Father is like every romcom you’ve ever watched, without any of the ‘rom’, and very little of the ‘com’.