Review of I Give It a Year (2013) by Robert S — 05 Mar 2013

This was a major disappointment. Billed as the next Britcom "from the producers of Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary & Notting Hill"... and less prominently mentioning it was written by a co-writer of Borat and with a trailer to match, this does itself no favours by setting itself up for a bad fall. This could be at best described as a dramedy... or a melodramedy more like. The humour here is sadly overworked until it falls apart - every joke laboured well past its use-by date until it starts feeling like teeth being pulled. Not that many jokes got a laugh from the entire cinema - the majority got a laugh from one or two people, though it seemed like almost everybody got a turn at that.

Stephen Merchant is probably the strongest cast member, but imagine David Brent being on Friends, sitting on the couch at Central Perk and that's his entire role in this film. He gets the most laughs, but then on the flipside his character could be wiped from the film with literally no impact on the plot. Anna Faris and Minnie Driver do as well as they can bringing out their roles, but Faris is given little to work with and Driver, like Merchant, gets one joke to keep revisiting for the entire film. The two main leads unfortunately have such dull characters that in the end we really don't care. As for Simon Baker, he appears to just play the douchebag from the ANZ comemmercials. Oh, wait.

Ultimately I can't blame the cast. It's the script... it wasn't there for them.