Love Actually - Movie Review

Well my friends it's finally that time of the year again where we put up our decorations and celebrate the holidays. If you put up your Christmas decor during October or November though you can go to Hell. Nah just kidding, but seriously what is with that? Anyways, the holidays are finally here and it's time where we would normally all gather together and enjoy a lot of things. If you're going to do so this year please be safe while you travel and while being with family. Whether you're with other loved ones or on your own remember that there are a lot of holiday movies and TV specials out there. And for this year I've decided to review one that I thought I'd give the old college try: Love Actually.

Love Actually is a romantic comedy about a combination of multiple stories all taking place in London on the final weeks before Christmas. All of them are filled with some sort of romance, from office love to a man falling in love with the newly made wife of his best friend to some guy who really wants to get laid. This collection of stories are all to give us the warm holiday vibes, along with sparking or remembering romances of new and old. In these romances we have a ton of famous actors playing all sorts of characters and it's all... very wholesome. Mostly wholesome, I mean I did mention of the stories involves a man who just wants to get laid and will travel across the pond to do just that.

So why am I reviewing THIS movie of all films during the Christmas? Because I miss Andrew Lincoln and this is one of the few pieces of media he's been in. Simple as that. I miss him on The Walking Dead and his portrayal of Rick Grimes, even if the show has gotten a lot better since he left it (though that improvement isn't tired directly to him). But then I discovered there are a lot of big actors in this film when I watched it, so many I was like, "OH DAMN, that's a lot people!" We also got Alan Rickman (Snape from Harry Potter), Kiera Knightly (Elizabeth from Pirates of the Caribbean), Liam Neeson (Taken), Colin Firth (Kingsman and 1917), Bill Nighy (Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy), Emma Thompson (Saving Mr Banks), and more! As more and more notable actors started to appearing I got a little worried that I was watching an "Oscar Bait" film. You know, one of the those films that have a ton of big actors, but the movie itself is only made/ released near the end of the year so it can trick people into nominating it. This was further increased as the main issue of the movie began to appear.

The biggest problem the film has is that it has a horribly paced script. It's trying to juggle eight different subplots at once, with some those can be totally removed without any real consequences. Some of them are very small, while others are big and have a lot of emotional impact on the audience. This is further a problem because it's only until the very end that they all begin to connect with one another. When we are not able to focus on a single or a few stories then they all become very... vague in terms of impact and quality. All of them have to do with love and the holidays in some way, but with a focus they were not that strong for me. Hearing people's thoughts on the film enforced that as well. I mean seriously, the film is around two hours and 15 minutes long and you're throwing in 8 stories into that time-frame. That's uhhh... that's going to be hard to pull off and this film doesn't really nail it. There were only a few that I felt should have stayed and if instead of 8 subplots we had like four or three that were more fleshed out things would feel more... important. If this film was ever to be remade it would need a much better script than what we got.

Now this isn't saying the stories are bad, they all have that some charm to them, even if it's a little hammy/ cheesy. Actually not a little cheesy, it got quite cheesy with some of the plot and dialogue, sometimes to the point of awkward. For instance we got one with Liam Neeson's character helping his 11-year old stepson, played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, get with a girl because he thinks he has found true love. Dude, you're like 11, you're too young to be going after true love at your age. None the less I found the stories to be pretty entertaining and I find that other viewers would be able to get more joy out of some of this romance than me. Though maybe I was just weirded out that Liam Neeson wasn't violently killing anybody and Alan Rickman wasn't some big villain in this movie. Plus I did feel some of the romance this film was trying to show, cheesy as it got. There was even sex and some nudity.

If I have to pick a favorite story from this film I would pick Mark (Andrew Lincoln), Juliet (Kiera Knightly), and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) (it's going to come with spoilers). Now I don't just love this because of Andrew, I can't just love something because of one actor. But Mark falls in love with Juliet, who's married to Peter, but she thought Mark always hated her. But there's this one scene near the end where Mark tells her the truth through cue cards and it's so romantic and sweet in how he tells her this, but also how says he just wants to see her happy and is letting her go for his best friend. That hit me in the feels hard! This is the type of sweet, loving, romantic drama I'm looking for in a movie like this. Again, there are so many stories that none of them feel very fleshed out, but that one had enough to it to really make it great. I would have loved a whole film about this story, but thankfully I got enough from this story to feel satisfied.

Now the comedy of this romantic comedy was decent, though there felt like there was a lot of misses. There is a scene with Rowan Atkinson and Alan Rickman that just dragged on and was not funny at all. It was a serious moment that was trying to be funny and it didn't work because I was very worried about Alan's character. On the other hand there is a moment from Lian Neeson where he bumps into a woman and they fall in love (that trope actually has to die) his "stepson," after the confrontation, tells him to tell her his feelings, which is funny because Neeson just told his kid to say those things to the girl he likes and it's pretty funny and heartwarming to see the two joke about with one another (Neeson even calls his kid and arse in a playful manner). It's just kind of hard though because it felt awkward a lot for me personally, but I'm sure others will get a lot more out of it.

Love Actually is a pretty good film about love, the holidays, and what it means to be with the people you care about. It's an odd film with way too many stories in it that could be cut down that ruin a lot of the impactfulness of the movie. Like I feel like instead of rewatching the film I'd go on youtube and watch certain scenes from the movie. All of these stories could be made into their own movies and I think they'd be stronger than bunched together. Still, the film has a pretty good heart in it and it's not trying to bait you into something that's going to make you go, "Oh my god I hate myself for watching this". There's a lot of sweetness in this movie and even if it's a little overdone and cheesy you'll get a warm, fuzzy feeling watching this movie. So I can possibly recommend this movie, even if it's just for Andrew Lincoln's epic cue card moment.

Tentative Score: 6/10

Definitive Score: 6/10

On a final note, there's is this one woman in the film that everyone keeps calling fat and saying she has chubby thighs and that genuinely made me angry because 1) She isn't that fat, 2) Even if she was she looked beautiful and being fat doesn't make a person ugly, and 3) Thick thighs save lives! I have spoken.