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Dean Craig
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Directed by Mike Newell
influenced Love Wedding Repeat (2020)
Plot Themes
It would have been interesting to see what British rom-com maestro Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Love Actually”) might have made out of “Love Wedding Repeat,” writer-director Dean Craig’s problematic English-language, Italian-set remake of the 2012 French film “Plan de Table” (No great shakes itself if its 28% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is any indication).
Still, there’s much to enjoy in the film’s first hour, which plays out a bit like an updated “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
The credited adaptation source for Love Wedding Repeat might be a minor French comedy from 2012 called Plan de table , but the model for this strained opera buffa is two Brit hits from the 1990s: Sliding Doors and Four Weddings and a Funeral .
The multiple get-togethers of 1994's Four Weddings And A Funeral are condensed here into a single wedding in an Italian mansion, no less.
The obvious major influence here is Four Weddings and a Funeral , one of the great rom-coms of British cinema.
Instead of a fresh take on Four Weddings and a Funeral , Craig offers a shameless ripoff of that 1994 rom-com classic without a trace of its champagne fizz.
The strangest thing about Love Wedding Repeat is that it takes over half the runtime to get to the premise suggested by its Edge Of Tomorrow -inspired title: Depending on a random re-arrangement of those place cards, there are thousands of ways in which the wacky wedding hijinks could’ve played out.
Inspired by 2012 French flick Plan De Table , there is a delicious premise at the heart of writer-director Dean Craig’s film: it’s a romcom played as Edge Of Tomorrow , a ’90s Richard Curtis-style confection but with all the spice of time-line tricksiness.
At first glance, you might think Netflix’s newest romcom Love Wedding Repeat some kind of play on Groundhog Day or—based on the title—a nod to Doug Liman’s 2014 hit Edge of Tomorrow, aka Live.
At first blush, director Dean Craig seems primed to bring a rom-com twist to the sub-genre of timeline-bending adventures that easily slot inside all sorts of different narratives — from “Groundhog Day” to “Edge of Tomorrow” to this year’s “Palm Springs.”
It doesn’t help that it takes half the film’s runtime to get to its Edge of Tomorrow -style premise, and it doesn’t even utilize it in a particularly interesting manner.
For his directorial debut, writer/director Dean Craig returns to the themes that first put him on the map as the screenwriter of Frank Oz’s 2007 film Death At A Funeral (followed by Neil LaBute’s version in 2011).
“Death at a Funeral” is probably the best recent example — either the 2007 British original or the 2010 US remake — and any movie can play along that involves a) a public family ceremony, b) a large and milling cast, and c) a spiked drink handed to precisely the wrong person.
Writer/director Dean Craig adapts the story of a wedding reception and all its possible (and missed) connections, probably aiming for something akin to his 2007 ensemble hit Death at a Funeral , a gut-busting comedy of errors about a family burying their elderly father and unearthing some very scandalous secrets along the way.
The wheels come off the plot so thoroughly it’s hard to imagine a more calamitous conclusion — at which point writer/director Dean Craig (Death at a Funeral) abruptly rewinds the action to the point where things began to go wrong and spins out a completely different scenario.
Bravo to Dean Craig, the double Death at a Funeral screenwriter of both the Franz Oz British original and the Neil LaBute American remake, making his debut as a feature director.
Craig’s an expert at the awkward comedy — both of his screenplays for Death at a Funeral are amusing in their own way — and there are solid gags here that are given the chance to marinate in a stew of uncomfortable pauses and statements, before coming to a head and bursting, much like a swollen boil on a nerd’s face, into a slapstick hijinks.
It’s in the vein of Sliding Doors or About Time , though, unlike the latter film, our characters don’t have any say in which reality that they’ll find themselves in.
At its best, there’s a bit of “Sliding Doors” meets Curtis’ 2013 charmer “About Time” to the conceit of this busy comedy of errors — lots and lots of errors — set during the wedding of the English Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) to the Italian Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) at a sumptuous, Rome-area villa.