When it comes to trying too hard, few films urge themselves on the viewer as strenuously as Man Up, a smug, manic London comedy that feels as if it’s come several years too late to the Richard Curtis party. American hyphenate Lake Bell (she wrote, directed and starred in In a World…) does a very creditable English accent as Nancy, a stay-at-home single woman who finds herself mistaken for a promising chap’s blind date, and plays along with the misunderstanding for a night of gaffes, improbable coincidences and cheap-as-chips one-liners. Bell is a fierce-eyed, glamorous amazon, so it’s a stretch to accept her as a gauche, blathering daughter of Bridget Jones. Even though she’s talented and personable enough to mostly pull off the routine, that failsafe romcom signifier of female gaucheness, the amusing woolly hat, still has to help out a lot.
Some talented people are required either to make fools of themselves (Rory Kinnear, uncharacteristically abrasive as an excitable pest) or simply smile approvingly from the back seats (Sharon Horgan, Harriet Walter). Simon Pegg, as Bell’s beau, is breezily affable but never seems quite at ease.
