MurrayEbert

My girlfriend and I suffered through this film, regularly considering turning it off. We persevered, thinking the average writing and awkward directing and acting might yield an upturn or surprise, but it really didn't. My favorite elements were the off kilter marriage counsellor (played by Olivia Colman). Stephen Merchant is funny as a person in most things I see him in, but in this it just didn't work. If the entire film around Stephen Merchant was built around the same style of inappropriateness, it would have been funnier, really. But considering a more earnest tone throughout, his scenes just put me on edge. There was no chemistry between any of the sets of couple, and the script just didn't have any sense of essentialness. It felt like a movie that didn't need to be made, for any reason. I came to Metacritic afterwards, expecting the score to be even lower than the current 50, and decided to sign up, to make sure that those thinking this might be worth watching as a no-brainer romantic comedy had a better chance of dodging this bullet. Seriously, watch something else instead.