Duo d'escrocs

Kate (Emma Thompson) and Richard (Pierce Brosnan) are a happily divorced couple, with two well-mannered children, an excellent (platonic) friendship, a comfortable home each, a lifestyle many aspire to and retirement that is pleasantly near. Then Richard discovers an unscrupulous businessman has stripped his company of all its assets and left them, and many of his staff, jobless and unable to pay the mortgage. With retirement on hold, they hatch a plan to exact their revenge and seize back their money. All they need to do is steal his latest acquisition: the world's biggest diamond.

The Love Punch is fluff. It is nonsense, deeply flawed, as shallow and predictable as a stomp in a puddle and unlikely to bother any award ceremonies or be a threat to any hard-hitting movies currently vying for screen space. However, it is also completely inoffensive, mostly fun, occasionally funny and the kind of film you can take the family (including granny) along to without causing anyone any offence. Just make sure you reward your teenagers with something they actually want to see afterwards; they just might need a does of Afflicted to clean the fluff from their brains afterwards.

Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan had apparently wanted to work together for years but had been waiting for the right project to come along. Joel Hopkins, with whom Thompson worked on Last Chance Harvey, granted their wish. Perhaps they should have waited a little longer.

The Love Punch is simplistic, ill thought out and riddled with errors. At one point, director/writer Hopkins has Richard moan "What do you think we are? The Pink Panther?", presumably unaware that the Pink Panther was not the thief but the diamond itself. It is this kind of silly clumsiness that spoils the enjoyment.

Though Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie, as their friends Jerry and Penelope, are welcome additions to proceedings and enable the heist to get underway, the comedy highlights generally occur between Thompson and Brosnan when Kate and Richard are alone and just getting on with their relationship. Most of the stilted moments and embarrassing clunks occur, much like in Brosnan's recent swamp experience, A Long Way Down, when all four are together and trying too hard to be funny.

The Love Punch falls short of the effortless humour and feel great factor of 2011's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel but it is far from being a turkey. It lacks the sharpness required to really satisfy and, with a little more work, it could have been a riot, but it is an easy, enjoyable waste of 90 minutes.

Overall, The Love Punch is like that third mug of tea on a lazy Sunday morning; it's quite enjoyable but you didn't really need it, it doesn't match expectations and you certainly won't remember it this time next week.

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I do enjoy a good British romantic comedy. My guilty pleasure I guess. They just make you laugh and feel good, just a little escapism and shouldn't be taken seriously. Being serious, well, that's for other films. Having said that, this movie has so many things wrong with it, it should be a huge failure, but oddly enough I loved it. I thought the two leads Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson were exceptionally well cast as they were so believable and likable. The other "good guy" Anglo-Saxon characters were good and as in so many other British films, the bad guys were French. I'm not sure how to judge their performances. The French accents were really dodgy at best and totally unbelievable, but this just added to all the fun. You know what? I must just watch this again, now.

So I this trailer a few weeks a go and I liked what I saw, it looked funny and entertaining. The movie itself isn't too bad either; the story is basically a divorced couple have to venture to France to steal a diamond because the owner has stole all their money via his company. The premise is nice and simple, a tad boring in places as they use one or two cliché scenes that you get in these types of films; the beginning is a bit slow and some of the jokes fall a bit flat but by the time the plot gets going it's quite enjoyable, the humor is classic British humor mixed with some modern stuff as well which makes a nice blend of funny, the characters were a amusing to watch and although I wasn't invested in their troubles I enjoyed watching them go about the heist. The shots were nice as they showed lots of France and gave the feel of it with the French music played over the scenes. All-in-all I think the older generation will get more out of it that than others but as a young person I enjoyed the majority of it.

A divorced couple lose everything and so they plan a robbery in order to recover what is rightfully theirs.

This is a light-hearted comedy through and through, the type we are getting more and more used to in seeing the former Mr Bond. One could go on about the insufficient storyline as well as the sheer impossibility of the break-in executed by utter amateurs.

Whilst I stand by the above but to judge it on that basis would be a miss and by treating it as a fun/cheerie comedy about a former couple who have to put up with another in order to salvage their pension and embark on an adventure it will suffice for a somewhat delightful time on the big screen.

Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson star in this comedy crime caper. While not nearly as polished as the classic The Pink Panther (1963), there is a small resemblance in suave and characteristically capable comparison between Brosnan and Robert Wagner in the Pink Panther. Only slightly derivative, this deliberately clumsy caper is a fun and light, entertaining story about how a divorced must negotiate on a plan to recapture stolen pension funds from a French investment schemer as well as their tangled relationship together.