Man Up is the new British Rom-Com from the Director of The Inbetweeners, which sees a down on her luck yet still incredibly smug, Lake Bell going on a blind date with a newly divorced, incredibly shallow and highly hypocritical Simon Pegg after she is mistaken for someone else. Taking place over the span of one night, Lake Bell’s character struggles to keep up the charade of being someone else as the evening becomes more and more chaotic and when the truth finally comes out you still have to sit through another 48 minutes of the film.
Now it may sound like I’m giving this film an unnecessarily hard time considering the talent that is involved, but that is actually part of the problem. Yes Simon Pegg and Lake Bell are both incredibly charming people, but that doesn’t mask the fact that their characters are incredibly horrible people. Simon Pegg’s character is incredibly hung up on his divorce, so shouldn’t really be going on a blind date, but also is obsessed with rubbing fake relationship in his ex-wife’s face and fixating on the idea of dating a 24 year old at the age of 40. Add to this the fact that Lake Bell’s character is actively choosing to ignore one of the most important nights of her parent’s life, a 40th anniversary, in order to keep up this lie, but then makes it all about herself when she arrives at the party.
One of the other big issues with the film is that it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a raunchy, dirty comedy or a Richard Curtis film. It tries to be both and fails on both ends: the raunchy jokes do not land as well as they would in The Inbetweeners and the characters and situations do not live up to the standards set in a Richard Curtis film. A Richard Curtis film will have flawed yet endearing characters worthy of redemption, yet this film is filled with self-serving unlikable characters from the two leads all the way through to Lake Bell’s family who clearly created a pathological deceiver within their daughter by fixating on relationships being the defining feature of an individual.
On top of all this the film seems to have borrowed it’s soundtrack from, well, whatever seems to fit at the time. The soundtrack moves from odd covers, to piano renditions of familiar tunes used in much better movies to every cliched tune you’d expect to hear when the film verges into the romantic or comedy cliche.
Overall, the film does not really know what it wants to be with many of the jokes falling flat, many of the situations being nauseating, and many of the characters being incredibly unlikable when you actually stop and think about it for a minute. It is unfortunate because all the talent involved really do deserve better than this featherweight Notting Hill Rom-Com of banality.
Man Up gets One out of Five Stars (the one star comes from the fact that the film is mercifully short)
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