Love Wedding Repeat (TV-MA)
Sam Claflin must save his sister’s wedding while trying to win over a woman he’s been pining for in Love Wedding Repeat, a movie with a cute concept that it doesn’t quite see through.
British Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) is marrying Italian Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) in Italy in a wedding whose guests are mostly his friends and family. Thus, there is an “English table” featuring Hayley’s brother Jack (Claflin), her friend Dina (Olivia Munn), Jack’s mean ex Amanda (Frieda Pinto) for some reason, Amanda’s insecure boyfriend Chaz (Allan Mustafa), awkward Sidney (Tim Key), Hayley’s Man of Honor Bryan (Joel Fry), the pushy Rebecca (Aisling Bea) and, though not invited, Marc (Jack Farthing), a coked-up former boyfriend of Hayley’s.
Marc threatens to cause a scene so Hayley gives Jack a powerful sleeping drug to slip into his drink and knock him out. But Jack doesn’t realize until it’s too late that the place settings have been moved around and the drug meant for Marc has gone to Bryan, an actor looking to impress a director who is one of the guests. Jack meanwhile is busy trying to connect with Dina, a woman he spent a day with three years earlier but has never stopped thinking about. And when he’s not trying to win over Dina, he’s trying to stay out of the horrible relationship between Amanda and Chaz.
We see the ripple effects of the errant sleeping drug mistake play out in the fortunes of all the English guests and Hayley and Roberto, culminating in what might be Hayley’s impending widowhood. But, a narrator tells us, there are thousands of ways eight people can sit around a table, suggesting that there are endless alternate ways the story of Hayley’s wedding could play out.
That idea is a cute conceit to build a featherlight romantic comedy on. But Love Wedding Repeat really only gives us two iterations — the first disastrous one and then the final one (we see sped-up snippets of alternate iterations in a very quick montage). More variations, even short ones, might have given us more insight to the characters and thus more payoff in the final version of the wedding. Also, I think getting through some of those first-wedding scenes quicker would have just generally been better; the jokes often go on much longer than needed.
Love Wedding Repeat is occasionally funny, occasionally sweet and watchable largely because of the natural charm of its central cast, specifically Tomlinson (who I know from Poldark), Claflin, Munn and Fry (who I sort of remember from a small part in Yesterday). C+
Rated TV-MA for language, according to Netflix. Written and directed by Dean Craig (based on the screenplay of a movie called Plan de table), Love Wedding Repeat is an hour and 40 minutes long and is available via Netflix.