3378. The Love Punch (2014)

Starring: Emma Thompson, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Spall

Director: Joel Hopkins

Running Time: 95 mins

The Love Punch is a British film about a pair of divorcees who travel to Paris in an attempt to recover a large sum of retirement money wrongfully taken from them.

Though it seems a little dismissive to say from the out, The Love Punch has ‘aeroplane movie’ written all over it, and so proves to be the case. Despite two stars in Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan appearing in the lead roles, the film is a distinctly bland affair, with painfully generic romance, comedy and action all thrown into a messy and ridiculous screenplay.

Of course, it’s important not to take a film like this too seriously. The Love Punch isn’t here to tell you a thrilling action story, and although the movie does go to ridiculous lengths even for the fluffiest of rom-coms, the film is still light-hearted enough to sit back, relax and enjoy with your brain turned off.

If you like Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson, then you’ll probably have a whale of a time with this movie, as both really play up their typical on-screen personas all the way through (with the exception of a bizarre dress-up sequence that actually provides some of the movie’s biggest laughs).

However, the reason that The Love Punch is in all truth little more than an aeroplane movie – that is a film with good production yet very little substance – is because its plot just doesn’t make any sense.

Attempting to drive home a generic ‘power of love’ message as divorcees Thompson and Brosnan reunite and inevitably fall for another once again, The Love Punch has very little else to do with the hour and a half of runtime it seems to have allocated itself.

As a result, the movie develops from a fairly generic albeit grounded romantic comedy to a full-on action spy movie, and all in the space of a few moments. In fact, the movie you get in the second half is a completely different animal to the first half, in some ways more entertaining, and in all ways more ludicrous.

Again, it very much depends on how high your tolerance is for preposterously fluffy romantic comedies. If you find stories so light they can’t even keep their feet on planet Earth an annoyance, then you’ll struggle to stomach The Love Punch the whole way through.

But if you want something totally devoid of reality, and yet with all the trappings of a sweet and cosy romantic comedy, then this is just the film for you. So, with that in mind, I’ll be giving The Love Punch a 6.9 overall.