Three successive weeks of really shoddy movies have taken their toll. Last weekend was the worst for UK box-office in over five years. Really, what do they expect when they release rubbish like Our Family Wedding and MacGruber? OK, the World Cup is on, but non-football-fans deserve better than Killers, Wild Target and Letters To Juliet.
Anyway, good news, there’s finally something worth seeing at the multiplex: Get Him To The Greek, starring Russell Brand. Remember Forgetting Sarah Marshall, with Russ as sex-addicted, drug-abusing rocker Aldous Snow? Well this is the spinoff, starring Jonah Hill as a junior record executive who is charged with flying to London, picking up Aldous, and getting him to LA’s Greek Theatre venue on time for a comeback concert.
As you can imagine, things don’t go according to plan, and it’s hard not to root for Jonah’s character as he struggles to hold it together while Aldous derails his life and forces him to smuggle heroin onto a plane concealed in an uncomfortable body orifice. It all gets a tad repetitive, but luckily it’s funny enough for that not to matter so much. Sean Combs, ie P Diddy, gives good value as Jonah’s exasperated boss – there’s a particularly funny bit where he’s trying to watch US reality programme The Biggest Loser (“Daddy’s favourite show”) with his kids. Also excellent is Rose Byrne as Aldous’ ex-wife. She’s been utterly unremarkable in thinly written roles in a series of movies such as Troy and Knowing. It’s great to see her finally given a chance to shine, and she seizes it.
Kristen Bell appears briefly in Get Him To The Greek, reprising her Sarah Marshall role from the original film. And, guess what, she stars this week in her very own movie, When In Rome. She plays an art-gallery curator who visits Rome for her sister’s wedding, gets drunk, plucks a few coins from a fountain and becomes the unwitting focus of romantic obsession. Apparently, if you take a coin from this fountain then the person who threw it there will fall in love with you. Kristen returns to New York, where four besotted guys stalk her.
Watching the likes of Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), Dax Shepard (Employee Of The Month) and Will Arnett (TV’s Arrested Development) humiliating themselves in this unfunny comedy is one of the more painful experiences that heat has endured recently. You just feel sorry for the actors. The only plus point is Josh Duhamel looking studly as the guy who really is the one for Kristen. He’s barely been in any movies outside the Transformers franchise in the past few years, and it’s good to have him back. If this is the best script he was offered, he needs to change agent.