I Give It A Year is a pretty ordinary Brit rom-com, a directorial debut and written by Dan Mazer, whose claim to fame is working with Sacha Baron Cohen (The Dictator) as a writer and director on the Borat films. In this comedy without romance for the newly weds Nat (Rose Byrne - Bridesmaids) and Josh (Rafe Spall - Prometheus), edginess and biting humour are lost in a mish-mash of banality that leaves you wondering why it was given the green light in the first place.

Marriage for twenty-somethings is possibly not seen as a really important commitment, especially if you don’t bother to really get to know your partner beforehand. This is the central point of this film. The fact that a whirlwind romance ends up becoming a premature, expensive celebration, that is marred by your foul-mouthed very unfunny best friend Danny (Stephen Merchant – The Office) -who seems to be type cast - is enough to make you want to get up and go while the going is good.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and when Nat meets a very handsome, wealthy, sexy and, dare I suggest, rather refined Guy (Simon Baker – The Mentalist), during a business proposal meeting, it made me sit tight and sit the rest of it out. And for Guy alone, it made it sort of worthwhile. After all, every film has its moment and when Guy and Nat are on screen is the only time the film has any pizzazz. They work very well together and succeed in compensating for the awful lines delivered by Danny and the limpid performance by Josh, who can’t seem to make up his mind whether he wants to run off with his old girlfriend Chloe (Ana Faris – Scary Movie 4), or not.

There is little to recommend this film, but credit must be given to the London scenes and it is refreshing to hear a Brit accent, even though the content is about as awful as many US rom-coms of a similar nature. Maybe there is an audience out there, but I doubt that it is enough to sustain it lasting any length of time at the cinema.

// SALT

Previewed at Sony Theatrette, Sydney on Thursday 7th February, 2013
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