Is Richard Curtis having a firesale on the rights to Love, Actually? A mere few weeks after Waitrose debuted its Keira Knightley ad (which featured her bonding with everyman Joe Wilkinson over the cheese counter, no less), Google has rolled out its own take on the film, this time in an advert starring none other than Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Martine McCutcheon.
Be warned: it is breathtakingly cringe. Filmed (naturally) on the Google Pixel camera, we see Brodie-Sangster sitting on a park bench overlooking the River Thames. He is there. What is not there: Liam Neeson, which immediately makes this whole thing about 10 per cent more disappointing.
“I come here a lot,” he tells us, as Van Halen’s Jump plays in the background. Why? He does it to get photographed by the random passers-by who recognise him from a film he appeared in two decades ago. Only, they don’t recognise him. They’re actually using the zoom function to photograph other people in the background.
While Brodie-Sangster keeps up a running stream of exposition (he does it all ‘for the fans’, apparently), we get to see the Google Pixel camera in motion, again and again, as Love Actually megafans continue to (he assumes) pap him on the street, in Christmas markets. The budget clearly wouldn’t stretch to Hugh Grant, so we see a zoom-in on the back of a man in a shirt wiggling his bum on the Southbank.
It gets worse. “Everybody loves a drumming scene,” he tells us, whilst hammering away on his drumkit, flanked by a band of Santas playing guitars. Over in the corner, Martine McCutcheon is swearing as she drops grocery items, and that’s apparently a moment that’s going to be uploaded on the Internet and go ‘viral’.
You get the idea. It’s a cheap attempt to appeal to our nostalgia, but with none of the charm that a Richard Curtis movie usually has. Instead, it makes Brodie-Sangster’s life sound like hell: poor bloke, unable to move on from a 2003 Christmas movie, and addicted to the thrill of getting papped when no-one recognises him.
How much was he paid to do this? Certainly a considerable amount. But then again, possibly not nearly enough. There’s not a lot of Christmas spirit here; instead, it makes me want to bury my copy of Love, Actually so deep it never sees the light of day again.
No more nostalgia baiting, please: give us something a bit more original.
