BEFORE: Well, I'm good for a couple wacky wedding movies every year - last time it was "Margot at the Wedding" and "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters". The year before that, it was "Destination Wedding" and "Muriel's Wedding". Before that, "The Wilde Wedding" and "Jenny's Wedding". Kind of comes with the territory if I'm going to focus on romance for a month, you have to figure.
Eleanor Tomlinson carries over from "Colette".
THE PLOT: While trying to make his sister's wedding day go smoothly, Jack finds himself juggling an angry ex-girlfriend, an uninvited guest with a secret, a misplaced sleep sedative and the girl who got away in alternate versions of the same day.
AFTER: Well, the description in the tagline made me think this was a film about time travel, that bit about alternate versions of the same day. But it's not, really, so I'm glad I didn't place this next to "Needle in a Timestack", which I watched in January. That film was also a romance, but based much more heavily in the logistics of time travel, while THIS film merely rewinds back to a certain point in the film to show several different ways of how this disastrous wedding scenario could have played out. It's much closer to this episode of "Community" in which the cast members were playing a board game, and when the food they ordered arrived, they rolled a die to see who should answer the door, and the episode then featured six possible comedic scenarios, each more outrageous than the last. Which one really "happened" was then up to the viewer. There was an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" with a similar time-loop, and then of course there are the multiple possible endings for the film "Clue". This one's kind of in that ballpark.
I've seen disaster wedding films before, as I mentioned above, but not one with so many difficult things that the main character (bride's brother) has to overcome. I wonder if the screenwriters just had so many ideas for ways that a wedding could run off the rails that they had to devise the proper vehicle to showcase them all - even though some are only seen very briefly before the rewind, and they just feature the characters fighting or someone taking off their pants, or falling into the big cake, and we kind of have to envision what possibly could have brought such circumstances into being. Others were saved for the "blooper reel" during the closing credits, it must be nice to have so many possible plot points that you can't even fit them all into the main film....
This falls a little short of the multi-verse ideas seen in "Everything Everywhere All at Once", though, but maybe that's a good thing, as that film was so complicated I don't think even the actors or directors understood how the whole multiverse thing was supposed to work. This is a little more clear, that the different scenarios are caused by the fact that there are eight people assigned to the one "English table" at the wedding, and before anyone gets seated, some kids run around the table and mix up the placecards. (The first of today's tips, never bring kids to a wedding. Never. Yes, NEVER.). The narrator asks us if we know how many different seating combinations there are for 8 people at a table, but never gives us the answer, because that's way too hard to figure out. Umm, no, it's not. It just depends if you're talking about combinations or permutations - in other words, does the order matter, or are duplicate seating arrangements that are rotations of others counted as the same?
Since there's ONE spiked drink at the table, we have to consider that position DOES matter, it's important to each possible scenario who drank the ruffied champagne. So that seat is position 1, the next seat is position 2, and so on. There are 8 possible people who could sit down in seat 1, and then for each of those people, there are 7 possible people who could sit in seat 2, 6 for seat 3, and so on. So the number of permutations is 8 times 7 times 6 times 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1, also called "8 factorial", and the answer is 40,320. Duh. Like, who doesn't know that? Thankfully the movie only shows us about 4 or 5 different results, theoretically there could have been so many more. (NOTE: The IMDB states that the number of seating combinations is 7 factorial, or 5,040 - this is because for each combination of 8 people, there are 7 identical seating arrangements, just rotated by one, so yeah, 40,320 divided by 8 is 5,040. But for the ways you could arrange the 8 people around the table with one spiked drink in a fixed position, I stand by my number of 40,320 - because it matters who gets the drink.)
Finally, after several nightmare scenarios where certain people are drugged and fall asleep, certain other people get out of control or get into fights, and times when the bride's ex interrupts the reception to claim that he slept with the bride recently, there is finally a depiction of how things might have gone rather well in the end. Well, they go tits up, and then a number of things manage to work themselves out. Bryan, the "maid" of honor, gives a successful toast and this manages to impress the important Italian film director, so he may have an acting career after all. and Jack, the bride's brother, finally gets a chance to connect with Dina, someone he spent a weekend with three years ago but never got the chance to kiss, thanks to an old college friend showing up at exactly the wrong time.
NITPICK POINT: The bride is British, the groom is Italian - so, umm, where is the wedding being held? The IMDB says this was filmed in Rome, Italy, so we can assume that the film is set there, the beautiful Italian castle/villa setting sure seems to back that up. But then doesn't that make it much more unlikely that the bride's coked-up ex would be able to crash the wedding? He didn't just drive or walk across town, he would have had to take a plane, and that would have been difficult in his condition, also expensive, right?
The film really wants today's "Love Tip" to be that in life, you have to take chances when the opportunities come your way. But MY "Love Tip" for the day is that if you're getting married, be aware that during the ceremony and reception, some things are going to go well, some things may go wrong, but you have to try to relax and have a good time, no matter what, because at the end of the day, you'll be married and anything that went wrong, you can laugh about later. This advice came from MY best man (I can't remember which wedding, though) and it was solid words of wisdom.
Also starring Sam Claflin (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Freida Pinto (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Joel Fry (last seen in "Cruella"), Jack Farthing (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Tim Key (last seen in "See How They Run"), Allan Mustafa, Aisling Bea, Paolo Mazzarelli, Simonetta Solder, Tiziano Caputo, Stefano Patti, Giusi Merli, Francesca Rocco, Achille Brugnini (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Alexander Forsyth, Christian Hillborg, and the voice of Penny Ryder (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul", but she's worked a lot as Judi Dench's stand-in - I guess they couldn't get Judi Dench to narrate this film, so they hired her look-alike, hoping that she'd also be a sound-alike?)
RATING: 7 out of 10 pointless stories about Jim and Jeff
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