Review of Love, Wedding, Repeat: An almost-good movie

What a strange almost-good movie this was.

My favourite performers were Aisling Bea and Tim Key, both of them comedians doing their comedy bits, I know them both from Taskmaster. Olivia Munn, who plays an American journalist attending a British Wedding in Italy look amazing, thought maybe didn't have as deep of a character as they could have given her.

It's one of those 'time loop' movies, where the story progresses with the first day events, and at some point, often at the day's end, the day repeats over and over again. Often there's one character who experiences the time loop, every loop, and comes with a 'lesson' or an understanding of some sort. Groundhog Day, for example, where the asshole tv presenter learns kindness and empathy, act like a goddamn human being to other people.

This movie was supposed to be one of those. Thus the 'repeat' part. And it's not, not really, in more ways than one.

To start with, and obviously there's going to be big fat spoilers coming, no single character experiences the 'loop' more than once. The story just pauses at the end of the first loop, and rewinds, shows us the alternate ways the future might have been decided if there had been a slight randomness in the arrangement of drinks. And does it over and over. So it's more of an alternate reality situation than a 'repeat' situation. Things aren't repeating really, we're just seeing what they might have been.

Second, there aren't too many 'repeats', unlike Groundhog day, or maybe other movies in the genre. Besides the first, original one, the movie 'fast-forwards' through all the other repeats until the final one, where it listlessly ends the original story in the way it 'should' have, but what it adds to the first one is unclear. The day seemed pretty similar to most of our characters either way.

And third, the 'original' story takes up most of the movie running time anyway. So much so that we were doubting if there's even the 'repeat' part in the movie, and if that was a misunderstanding on our part on what the movie was about. 90% of the movie is one single thread. It ends in a really poorly scripted manner, boring and meandering. Then the writers 'undo', give us a glimpse of the various other possibilities, and come up with the 'best possible' scenario. An attempt at becoming a tearjerker, though it doesn't work out.

It doesn't work out because there's a good movie hidden in this mess, but it's not the one the writers intended it to be. They had a pretty decent wedding comedy at their hands, with excellent performers all around, amazing comedians too. They could have played it straight, run through one single storyline, created a bit of emotional drama in the end, and sorted it out with comedic hijinks, like they do in a couple of the 'runs', and in the final storyline. But that's not what they wanted to do, clearly. They wanted to force in the time loop aspect into the story, and that's why it fails.

Even then, with expert editing, they could have salvaged it into something more...wholesome, more nourishing. Not to be so. Everyone in the team must have gone along with this convoluted mess of a movie.

What a waste. Amazing cast, great comedic actors giving their best, and a pretty decent movie three fourths of the way through. An 'auteur', a good editor could still fix this movie, by abandoning a few poor choices, and strategically merging scenes in. It's not a total loss. It can make a come back.

I'd suggest you watch it, for the first story at least, till the ending of it, when things escalate at an unlikely pace, and leave it at that. The loops that follow don't add anything to the comedy, or the story. And to make space for the other loops, they botch up the ending of the original story as well. It's just the endings though. Just like the ending of the Game of Thrones series shouldn't stop you from reading the books, the poorly done later 'loops' shouldn't stop you from enjoying the comedic chemistry of the performers.