This film hit all the usual romcom beats. You know what is going to happen from the very start.
Saying that I enjoyed this much more than the other new romcom Rye Lane.
This was okay.
A cross cultural romcom that has some entertaining moments and it's certainly lavish and ambitious, but ends up being predictable and a little clumsily scripted that it lacks the freshness of the best in this genre. Lily James, here with a role that has more for her than some of her previous films, plays Zoe, an award winning documentary film maker with problems forming relationships much to her sparky mother's (Emma Thompson) chagrin. When she bumps into her childhood friend, Kaz (Shazad Latif), a British born Pakistani man, she learns he is about to embark on an arranged marriage. Fascinated Zoe gets him to agree to her documenting the process from finding the potential wife to going to Pakistan for the wedding. On this journey they discuss issues of love and relationships. You can guess where it all ends up and you'd be right, the ending pretty much signposted from the get go. There's some laughs along the way although the comedy is sparse mostly down to the somewhat poor script and the film doesn't quite decide what it wants to say about the issue of arranged marriage in a modern cross cultural society. Perhaps that was the idea and it's more about the cultural anomalies as well as a look at modern relationships. Thompson is obviously having fun and has most of the funny lines and some of the characters are stereotypical but here is an enjoyable film that will bring smile and romcom lovers will not be disappointed.