Tom Bennett and Jennifer Saunders lend their skills to a film that has no shortage of talent but is sorely low on good gags
Beattie Edmondson is the tremendous comic performer who made her name in the BBC’s excellent flatshare sitcom Josh, with Josh Widdicombe and Elis James; now, after some walk-on film parts in Bridget Jones’s Baby and Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, she gets a quirky starring role in this sentimental and worryingly gag-free romantic comedy. She is Sarah, a klutzy singleton hopeless with relationships and everything else, who inherits an adorable pug called Patrick from her late grandmother.
At first she loathes the dog but then grasps that by taking Patrick for walks in the park she gets to meet men, including a hunky vet (Ed Skrein) and a sensitive bloke (Tom Bennett). There’s a cameo for Edmondson’s mum, Jennifer Saunders. An awful lot depends on the awwww effect of those closeups on the pug’s face. If you think that the dog is overwhelmingly lovable then this will supercharge the film with a feelgood factor over and above anything attributable to the script or performances .To be honest I did quite like Patrick, but maybe not every bit as much as I was supposed to. Some of the plot turns on the idea of one of Sarah’s suitors being not quite as nice as initially assumed – but then he shows himself to be nice after all. And Sarah has to be absolutely thrilled at the idea of living on a houseboat, which is unlikely to say the least. It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?
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