Love Hurts

A movie about divorce, realizing what is important and the bond between a father and son. After his wife (Moss) leaves Dr. Bingham (Grant) he goes into a deep depression. With help from his son Dr. Bingham changes his image and starts dating again and seems happy. When his son falls in love he puts his plans on hold and helps his son, and learns more about his wife in the process. This movie is really funny and unexpectedly touching in parts. Dr. Bingham thinks only of himself until his son falls in love and then the bond between him and his son starts to grow and it is fun to watch how they interact with each other. This movie was very surprising one of the funniest movies that has come out in the last few months. I give it a B.

This is a basic get some money rom com without much com and not a lot of rom either. I cannot but think they just produced this out of the romcom sausage machine and used the quantity rather than quality attitude in the hopes it would be a success.

Thing about Richard E. Grant is he doesn't seem to be able to get part re-playing - and re-playing and re-playing - the character he played in "Withnail & I" and "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" - both of which are classics.

Withnail was in 1987 - Grant's first film - and How to Get Ahead in Advertising was in 1989 - that's over 30 yrs ago and Grant has made over 100 movies since then - but in every scenario, no matter how unsuited, he's always Withnail.

So what is the Withnail character - well, it's a frenzied Brit who is interminably bemused by the circumstances in which he in interminably incongruous.

And in Withnail and How to Get Ahead - he had a perfect fit with.writer/director Bruce Robinson - who had the "Benny Hill" sensibility of that era in Brit comedy to a tee - sharp dialogue, hilarious nonsensical narratives, etc etc.

So with Robinson, although Grant played basically the same character, the settings were completely different - in Withnail, he's a dispossessed 60's London gad-about and in "Getting Ahead" he's a slick 1980's advertising exec - but Robinson makes it work in both cases without seeming to be repetitive.

Without Robinson, or a script/director of similar wit and panache - Grant is lost and is like a audio clip that just keeps skipping and repeating.

In this offering, Grant has nowhere near a Robinson level story or script or cast of supporting actors - and, consequently, it's just a below mediocre mash with Grant flopping around being bemused but definitely not amusing.

Well, there it is ...

Stop me if you've heard this plot before: Wife leaves hubby because he's become too boring and inattentive. Hubby must somehow reconnect with the youthful self she fell in love with in order to win her back.

In the interim, the writer and director have to come up with a bunch of "funny" stuff to happen to Hubby before he finally achieves his goal. This includes him learning to be a stud and hooking up with a host of really unappealing ladies, including Jenna Elfman as his sushi-crazed secretary and Janeane Garofalo as an unorthodox Orthodox Jew. But the "funny" stuff is on the order of him going nuts at an 80's Karaoke night, and bowling badly while under the influence of cannabis fudge. I'd call these scenes "funny-adjacent" rather than funny. They're similar to scenes you'd find in a funny movie, minus the laughs.

Bottom Line: Richard Grant is no Hugh Grant, but this film is watchable--just.

Love hurts, and divorce hurts too, especially if you're so self-absorbed that you have no idea what's happening. Moving on also hurts when you're completely clueless about how regular people in society operate. "Love Hurts", the film, is a comedy, but it also hurts because the hackneyed jokes are more painful than funny.

None of the characters (the ex-wife, the sex-crazed assistant, or the candid son) were thought out at all. They were empty, annoying, and unintentionally more clueless than Ben, our "hero". I came close to liking Ben. Richard E. Grant can pull off sarcasm with aplomb, and he has a look that you can laugh at even when he's drunk and contemptible. But it takes a significantly better written film than this to successfully have an anti-hero hero.

"Love Hurts" doesn't have anything original, and nothing particularly funny. Most characters didn't make much sense, but they also weren't written as people, they were walking, talking jokes—which unfortunately didn't even provide any laughs. Grant brought everything he could to the character of Ben, and you can almost watch the film for him, but I would just recommend finding him in something else instead.