The Love Punch

There’s a moment here when Emma Thompson, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie march determinedly into a building like Mr White and company in Reservoir Dogs and that’s when I wished Quentin Tarantino had made this film. It would have been more violent and the language would have been fiercer but it would have been sharper and I’d have enjoyed it more.

Not that director/writer Joel Hopkins’s movie is without merit. It has that cast for a start but it tries too hard; it’s amusing and fairly engaging but it strives to be witty and when wit fails, it falls back on farce, slapstick and pratfalls.

Thompson and Brosnan are middle-aged, middle-class and divorced. Spall and Imrie, equally middleclass and middle-aged, are Thompson’s next-door neighbours. Just as Brosnan is about to retire he discovers his firm has been taken over by Paris-based asset strippers, led by Laurent Lafitte, and the pension fund stolen.

But he and Thompson (not to mention a score or so of other employees) are reliant on their pension for a comfortable old age. What to do? The pair go to Paris to appeal to Lafitte’s better nature but he has fewer morals than a bonus-laden banker and has them thrown out.

Impasse then? Well, not quite for Lafitte has bought a $10m diamond for his bride-to-be (Louise Bourgoin) and she will wear it on their wedding day. So it’s simple, isn’t it? Brosnan, Thompson and neighbours must nick the diamond, sell it and solve everyone’s problem, though what kind of pension $10m would provide for so many people is open to question.

Of course, such a film demands suspension of disbelief. But as Spall and Imrie join the others in Paris before they all head for Lafitte’s chateau on the Riviera to gatecrash the wedding, disguised as Texas millionaires and wives, and carry out the theft, my disbelief said, ‘the hell with this, I’ve been suspended long enough’.

Even an outright farce should be based at least upon possibility but this plot simply heaps unlikely upon implausible upon improbable until you can take no more. The inevitable subplot involves the question of whether Thompson and Brosnan will get together again romantically. Well, will they? What do you think? Give it your best guess.

Paris and the Riviera look gorgeous as you would expect and there’s a neat twist at the wedding when Bourgoin turns out to be not at all the kind of girl she seemed. This is admittedly a gimmick to justify what happens next but it works.

Otherwise it is undemanding, light-hearted and is aimed, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, at the wrinkly audience to prove that there’s life in the old dog yet (as, to continue the canine theme, there is in the bitch, too).

Thompson and Brosnan work well together with a nice rapport but they, like Spall and Imrie, deserve rather better material than this.