Review of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) by Jesse O — 21 Oct 2012

This is a great movie, albeit it's one that doesn't reinvent the wheel in any way, though its story is told in a very sweet but mature and effective manner. It's also a very funny movie, in fact it may actually have one of the funniest lines I've seen in a movie this year.

Of course I'm not going to spoil the line, but it is quite hilarious. This film is a great showcase for a cast of incredibly talented actors/actresses. The movie doesn't really have overarching theme, well other than Sonny trying to save the hotel and make it a success, but the movie is mostly comprised of the characters and their individual stories.

These cover a lot of ground but they're all interesting and help add a little extra depth to the characters. Since there are a bunch of characters that the movie wants to focus on, the movie could have felt like a mess structurally but, fortunately, it doesn't.

There's a good balance and there's never too much of a story at one time, so there movie also has excellent pacing. The characters themselves have great chemistry with each other and, again, it seems like the actors had a lot of fun filming this.

There's also a moment, one of the characters dies (which you really had to expect), though I'm not spoiling who it is, and I thought it was done simply to add some more melodramatic aspects to the film that weren't needed.

As has been stated, I'm not a big fan of killing off characters just because you feel the movie needs more dramatic moments, I find it to not be very satisfying or particularly good storytelling. But this movie handled the death with a lot of class and intelligence and it didn't come across as cheap melodrama, it was very well-handled.

Again this is a great movie, it handles its characters and its story with a lot of respect and maturity and the actors were simply tremendous, so I simply can't recommend this movie enough. Great stuff here.