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Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

A forgettable rom-com which isn't that funny

Friday, April 25, 2008

Is it enough that this week's big movie stars Russell Brand, and comes from team behind comedy hits Knocked Up and The 40 Year-Old Virgin?

Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand, Mila Kunis

For the first time in a while that most popular pictures' promise "from the people who brought you ..." is actually starting to mean something.

But the squad involved in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up is becoming big enough to start a second team.

And they're cranking the movies out faster than Man U near-disasters — and not a million miles from them.

So, just a few weeks after 27 Dresses, comes yet another comedy with about enough ideas and laughs to make it memorable.

Yet, five minutes after you set out for home, you'll be forgetting not just Sarah but almost everyone else.

Having now established their own trademark the Knocked Up/Virgin crowd set off in search of other formulae.

The problem with mixing two acquired tastes — the Apatow/ Rogen comedy stylings with the singular Mr Russell Brand — is that it can come out a strange flavour.

Rogen plays the nice guy just dumped by drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend (Bell, best known as Elle Bishop from TV's Heroes) for an obnoxious new lover (Brand). Distraught — and a grown man crying is only funny for so long — he decides to take himself on holiday to Hawaii in an attempt to move on. Instead he finds the new couple have moved in, would you credit it, to the very same hotel.

From Elvis through to Adam Sandler, rom-coms have done Hawaii to death.

With apologies to the great Jack Lord, this is Hawaii 10-0.

Some of it is funny, some of it is smart, bits are even both at the same time but there is too much which is just plain empty-headed.

Though amiable enough, it has the same over-indulgence, ill-judged editing, and some apparently impromptu ad-libbing (probably well scripted) that marred Knocked Up, Superbad and Walk Hard! for me.

The old adage 'you never touch funny' only works if you know what funny is in the first place.

The 'team' have brought in a new director, Nicholas Stoller, best known for the Jim Carrey remake of Fun with Dick and Jane but the writer is Jason Segel, who played a character called after himself in Knocked Up and doubles up here as unlikely leading man, Peter Bretter.

He plays a composer who writes the soundtrack for the crime drama series his girlfriend stars in but dreams of creating a musical about Dracula which only works when he realises it's a comedy.

Certainly this flick establishes the Brand, now a movie regular after recent appearances in Penelope and the St Trinian's re-hash. Brand plays the mega rock-star whose name just hints at a coke addiction issue: it's Aldous Snow.

As usual, Brand just plays himself and at times seems to be in a different movie: which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Now showing at cinemas across Northern Ireland.