WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAY (Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (July 10). See listing. Rating: NN
What We Did On Our Holiday is an interesting domestic comedy for exactly half its running time, and then the whole thing falls apart so totally that you can almost hear the pieces hit the floor.
Writer/directors Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin are the team behind the UK family sitcom Outnumbered, and they apply the same dynamic to their first feature, contrasting the concerns of adults (Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike, Doctor Who’s David Tennant) with the more impulsive and naive actions of their young children.
For a while it works really well, with the divorcing parents trying to keep their separation under wraps so as not to disrupt a 75th birthday celebration for the kids’ ailing grandfather (Billy Connolly, delightful as always).
And then it all goes terribly wrong, the characters responding to a turn of events in increasingly unbelievable ways for the sake of awkward comedy and mawkish lesson-learning. I love Tennant and Pike, and will watch them in anything. I guess this proves that. 95 minutes
