A Few Best Men

A Few Best Men
- A few mediocre at best men more like it

  My friends and I had originally geared ourselves up for the high octane, cheap-thrill-heavy Expendables 2 but after failing to get tickets we opted to buy tickets for this Australian/British Hangover style comedy we opted to the the bar to have a second pint in the interim period.  Maybe rather than enhancing my enjoyment of the film, the Hoegaarden numbed my funny bone but when you're not expecting too much, you're not likely to be disappointed.  Truth be told, I hadn't heard much at all about A Few Best Men before I went and saw it.  I couldn't have told you who was in it and after reading the cast list on the cinema "What's showing" pamphlett, I still couldn't have told you any of the films the stars had previously appeared in.  With the exception of Kris Marshall, famous for playing a man-boy-child character in long running, largely inoffensive BBC sitcom My Family and appearing in BT adverts for the last dacade, there was no-one in the film who registered more than "I think I recognize that guy, but from where".  Only by cheating and looking on www.imdb.com have I been able to ascertain that Kevin Bishop was in Grange Hill and had his own show that ran for two series on Channel 4 and the long suffering groom was played by Xavier Samuel, who apparently appeared in some Twilight sequel which I have never seen because I have some vague sense of self respect.

That's not to say any of the cast were particularly bad but by and large the acting standards ranged from at  best "quite good" to at worst "a little bit bland".  Marshall continues his streak of playing immature, old-enough-to-know-better batchelor characters, whilst Bishop plays a Woody Allen/Mort Goldman style neurotic bumbler (ironically with a Hitler moustache).  Laura Brent and Xavier Samuel do the best with the script that they're given, acting as likable but largely forgettable protagonists in a film that seems to opt to be just that: amiable but unexceptional.  Perhaps credit is most due to Olivia Newton-John for playing out of control mother of the bride, acting as the leftist opposite to her on screen, politically right husband.  On the political note, the whole film was suprisingly left with both soft and hard drugs being used with only minor consequences for the characters and hilarity ensuing from said consequences.



Kevin Bishop's character, complete with moustache and allergies

Hilarity as a whole though, didn't really ensue.  Comparisons between this film and the Hangover will inevitably be drawn and the producers were obviously trying to draw in the same crowd, however whilst the Hangover was fresh and strangely satisfying, more or less everything in this Aussie/Brit clone has been done before - the groom's party wake up to find an animal wandering about their rooms, they have shenanigans with their crazy drug dealer and ultimately are charged with the task of rectifying all of their mistakes.  The thing that annoys me about both of these films is that none of the characters ever seem to actually suffer from a hangover.  At no point in this film did any of the main characters complain about having a pounding headache, dizzyness, nausea (aside from a character who downs three bottles of champagne on the day of the wedding) or even "The Fear".  I would love to see some character get the 5 O'Clock in the afternoon of the next day paranoia spells I get from a heavy night.  Seriously, just once I'd like to see a character appear jittery, sweaty and nervous as they try to contemplate the purpose of their existence whilst trying to "get their shit together."  Instead they run around having their hijinx to some increasingly bland quirky Australian ska covers of existing songs, often mixing it up with close up shots of the spanking blonde wedding singer as if the director wanted to launch her to musical stardom through this film.

The film's biggest flaw is its predictability.  It starts with a shallow sentimental "I love you moment" between the two lovers and more or less ends with the same moment.  You could yell at me for saying that's a spoiler but the film is shot in such a way that nothing other than the last fourty seconds pre-credits act as a suprise.  The slapstick jokes are so often delivered as "visual set up", delay, "visual punchline", with the punchlines very rarely being anything other than exactly what you expected it to be.  For me this meant the laugh factor was much lower than it ultimately could have been.  Whilst I could hear a lot of laughs from the rest of the audience, the four of us watching were compartively silent, I can only presume they were the twenty or so people in the western hemisphere who haven't seen the Hangover. 

The bottom line is that this film is just too average to buy a cinema ticket on any other day than a £3.00 Tuesday or whatever your local cinema's variant is.  It'll be better suited for those nights where you and your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse/moose/wookiee are tired after a long week of work, want to stay in rent a movie and fall asleep on the couch three quarters of the way through.  Despite the odd moment of gross out comedy involving a sheep's rectum, this is inoffensive old hat, not without its charms but not exactly full of them either.