MAN UP (Ben Palmer). 88 minutes. Opens Friday (November 20). See listings. Rating: NNN
I’m a sucker for movies where smart people fall in love. Smart, well-written people, anyway. And about 60 per cent of Man Up is that sort of movie. This is enough.
Man Up pairs Lake Bell and Simon Pegg as a singleton and a divorcé who find themselves on a blind date in London thanks to a series of wacky circumstances. As long as it sticks to the date instead of the wacky circumstances, Tess Morris’s screenplay has a lighthearted charm.
Bell and Pegg have genuine chemistry – though Bell struggles to maintain her English accent, if we’re being honest – and their characters are allowed actual human faults and idiosyncrasies. It’s a pleasure to watch these people spend a few hours discovering each other.
It’s only when Man Up tries to be an outsized comedy that things threaten to go pear-shaped: the gifted Rory Kinnear is saddled with the unplayable role of a comic-relief stalker, and a sequence with Olivia Williams as Pegg’s snippy ex feels like it was dropped in from a different movie.
Try to tune them out and focus on the good stuff. It worked for me.
