Review of Man Up

Man Up (I) (2015)
2/10
bland
10 September 2015
A woman of a certain age obsessed with meeting the right man pretends to be someone else in order to enjoy a blind date. Not a bad premise for a romcom, but the elements here are all wrong. They drink shots like 20-year-olds, dance to Duran Duran like 50-year-olds, fart about in the bowling alley like mouth-breathing 14-year-olds, and her family treat her like she is retarded. There is a nice twist when the male character's motivations for choosing a particular bar are revealed, but his oafish behaviour after that is out of character. Thus consistency in characterisation gets sacrificed in a (failed) attempt to get laughs. The female seems to have no luck with meeting men, despite being drop dead gorgeous. It is also supposed to be wacky, zany and adorable when she says 'vagina' and 'f*ck" on the train really loudly, except people really do curse loudly on the train, when your kids are with you, and it is obnoxious and you just want to punch them. Tonally inconsistent, forced conflicts, inauthentic to the times, and trying too hard, this film suffers from being made by BBC Films, who take bland to a new level in order to have content for BBC One on a Sunday night. Dialogue straight from Hollyoaks and none of the drama of Strictly, the only people who will celebrate this film are ITV.
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