Review No.18: The Decoy Bride

The thing with this blog is that I would watch films that I probably wouldn't have picked otherwise, Mercenaries is a case in point, and just like that film The Decoy Bride seems like a movie that would go straight to DVD. Maybe it's because it has some big names in there with David Tennant and Alice Eve playing a couple who are about to get married but she is constantly hounded by the press as she is one of the world's most famous actresses. To dissuade the paparazzi they travel to a small Hebiedean island which Tennant's author James previously wrote about although it turns out that he googled all of his research and never actually went there despite this book being what Lara fell in love with in in the first place. Lara's 'people', played by Ugly Betty's Michael Urie and screenwriter Sally Phillips, have to put together the dream castle that she imagined from the book but even then the press arrive so these two pick a local girl to become her decoy but surprise surprise these two end up married instead. This girl is Katie a girl whose returned to the island following a unsuccessful career on the mainland working on an online trouser magazine and finds herself the only unmarried female in a world with no young men left. You can then really make your own mind and join the dots to what happens next but the film does include a scene in which two deaf people dance to Tennant playing the bagpipes badly.

If that above scene is something you've always wanted to see then The Decoy Bride might be for you if not then there's very little going on here. This is by no means a bad film but the best compliment I can lavish upon it is that it is quite easy-going and uncomplicated. The thing I couldn't get past is that the two central characters are fairly unlikeable Katie is self-loathing and unmotivated while not very attentive to her dying mother while James has written a best-selling book by plagiarising most of his material. In fact the most likeable of the three leads is Eve's Lara who isn't the spoilt movie-star but rather a caring, poetic girl who helps one of the islanders live out her dream in fact The Decoy Bride would be better if James was escaping a woman who wasn't very likeable rather than this charming saint-like beautiful actress. The best parts are the comic agents played by Phillips and Urie the latter playing an approximation of his character Mark from Ugly Betty these two get all the asides and his campy nature lends itself well to a film that is fairly slow elsewhere. There is a lot of wasted talent though both James Fleet and Dylan Moran aren't on screen long enough and the natives of the island are all clichéd oddballs. So a romance between two characters who deserve each other and a comedy that made me smile but never laugh and I'm sure this is meant to be a great British romcom.

Verdict: For an average uncomplicated romcom it gets a standard 4/10