Man Up
Director: Ben Palmer
Talent: Lake Bell, Simon Pegg, Ophelia Lovibond, Rory Kinnear
Release Date: 29th May 2015
Hanging a romantic comedy around the weird and nebbish figure of Simon Pegg was never going to be a good idea, but there’s still a significant population of sexually regressed bougie dullards living in townhouses in London (and people who want to be like them) with an appetite for sub-Richard Curtis ephemera, and *someone* had to star in this, so here we are. Man Up is, in fact, more centred around relatably klutzy and unlucky-in-love thirty-something Nancy (Bell) who, through a fortunate misunderstanding, ends up on the wrong blind date with Jack (Pegg), a motor-mouthed divorcé to whom she playfully maintains the pretence that she is someone else until realising that she actually has feelings for him. But can they be honest with one another? Neither Bell nor Pegg are magnetic on-screen presences, making it hard to care either way, while the narrative advances with the slow and predictable purpose of damp on drywall, or the creeping, aesthetically bankrupt gentrification that is the setting of this very English, very passable romance.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
