This bittersweet romcom two-hander is pretty excruciating, like a feature-length deleted scene from Richard Curtis’s Love Actually … Deleted, that is, because it frankly doesn’t work. Kris Marshall plays Tom, a guy who one Christmas finds himself moping around on London’s touristy-bohemian South Bank and accidentally bumps into Eloise (Annelise Hesme), his sleek French ex with whom he’s still very much in love. She has half an hour to kill before getting on a train and leaving the UK for ever, with her new partner. So they stroll around making halting conversation and the action periodically flashes back to their abysmally unfunny and unconvincing meet-non-cute: they were trapped in a lift together.
The movie is competently put together, like a TV commercial, but the dialogue and characterisation are pretty unbearable, a Google Translate version of English, spoken by characters who are almost but not exactly like human beings. Maybe Curtis himself could have made something of it.
