‘Love Wedding Repeat’ Rehashes More Successful Rom-Coms

Though it is based on a 2012 French film, Netflix’s “Love Wedding Repeat” feels familiar for other reasons. With its initial sweeping shots of Rome, it could easily be confused for “To Rome With Love,” while its series of intertwining storylines following guests at a wedding could make it “Four Weddings and A Funeral.” In his directorial debut, Dean Craig manages to create a mere facsimile of more successful rom-coms. Unfortunately, his end product simulates the most lackluster element’s of Woody Allen’s failed love letter to Rome, with none of Richard Curtis’s charm. Though Craig’s project boasts a perfectly capable cast and a gorgeous setting, these elements cannot save the film from major character development flaws and an endless, pedantic plot.

Jack’s (Sam Claflin) sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) is about to get married in Rome. For several years, he has been enamored with Hayley’s friend, Dina (Olivia Munn), but any chance at a happy relationship has been thwarted by pesky interruptions. Jack decides that this wedding is his opportunity to finally win her over, but his plans are disrupted by Hayley’s crazed, drugged-up ex-boyfriend Marc (Jack Farthing) who shows up to ruin the day. Tasked with slipping sleeping drops into Marc’s drink by his sister, Jack finds himself running around fixing the situation when another guest accidentally ingests the sleeping draught.

The film’s central plot device is a repetition of the day’s events à la “Groundhog Day.” A group of children end up mixing up the original seating arrangement and the film presents two potential sequences of the day based on these different arrangements. The first scenario represents a day where everything goes horribly “wrong” and the second half of the film focuses on a day where everything goes “right” for Jack.

To show that there are a number of possible versions of this day, the film shows short, fast-forwarded clips of events based on different, mixed up arrangements. The issue with this is that the film does not justify why it picks these two specific chains of events over any others. And given the number of mishaps that occur in both days, it is unclear why one is a more “successful” version than the other.

It might even be a cynical choice, contradictory in a film that pretends that love conquers all. Are we supposed to believe that Jack and Dina are really meant to be together if the only reason they end up together is place setting? This takes away any sweetness from their ultimate reunion.

But before we get to this predictable ending, we have to suffer through a series of tiresome antics as Jack attempts to both stop Marc from ruining the wedding and win over Dina. Besides Jack’s storyline, the film also focuses on the unstable relationship of Jack’s ex-girlfriend Amanda (Freida Pinto) and her insecure, jealous boyfriend Chaz (Allan Mustafa). They spend most of the film arguing about Jack and their own incompatibility.

The film turns to Sidney (Tim Key), an eccentric bore, and Bryan (Joel Fry), Hayley’s foolish male maid-of-honor, for comic relief, though neither stereotypical character delivers. This is largely because they are cut from the same cloth of one-dimensional idiot. They have no charisma and the tiresome jokes about them are recycled endlessly.

To make matters worse, the main characters are largely unlikeable. We know so little about Hayley and her motivations that it is difficult to become invested in her arc. For instance, her extreme stress over this wedding is never fully explored and neither is her clumsy reasoning to sleep with an ex-boyfriend. Because we've cultivated no sympathy for her, hiding such an act from her future husband feels nothing more than dishonest. What makes it all the more difficult to pity her is her proposed solution to deal with a problem she has created: Emotionally blackmailing her brother into roofying Marc is just morally wrong. In all, she’s a lazily written character and it is difficult to understand why she should be protected from the consequences she faces.

Dina might initially appear harmless, but that is exactly why she’s such a terrible, unbelievable character. If Jack is a sad rehash of Hugh Grant’s bumbling Charles in “Four Weddings,” then Dina is an exact replica of Andie MacDowell’s Carrie. However, Dina’s passivity is hard to buy in 2020. There are a number of occasions where she could have ended his misery and all of our own by confessing her feelings for him. Instead, she leaves all the emotional labor up to him. It’s all the more disappointing given how hard Craig tries to make her sound impressive (giving us details about her journalistic career), but then erases it all by pretending that she is not an autonomous human being capable of independent action. As much as Jack's endless Herculean efforts distract us, no amount of this can make us forget that female agency does, in fact, exist.

Overall, the film is a great disappointment. While it might have some faint glints of humor in the form of Aisling Bea as Rebecca, one of Hayley’s friends, these ephemeral moments get buried under terrible jokes about vomiting and genitalia. To say that the actors’ talents are vastly underused is a dramatic understatement: They are barely allowed to perform these poor excuses of characters. “Love Wedding Repeat” would need a complete rewrite and much sharper material to even remotely reach the level of the films it attempts to emulate.

— Staff writer Aline G. Damas can be reached at aline.damas@thecrimson.com.