I Give It a Year strains to provide laughs

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      Starring Rafe Spall and Rose Byrne. Rated 14A.

      Although I Give It a Year scores points by attempting to subvert some romantic-comedy conventions, it ends up simply confirming them, badly.

      A first directorial feature for writer Dan Mazer, who crafted (if that’s the word) a lot of Sacha Baron Cohen’s stuff, the film has an able cast that gives a solid effort. The strain’s all too visible, however, with Rafe Spall (Will Shakespeare in Anonymous) and Rose Byrne (Bridesmaids) sometimes painfully debasing themselves as Josh and Nat, two big pains clearly not made for each other, nor for us.

      The incomprehensibly boorish Josh is a published novelist, while profoundly uptight Nat works at a big PR firm. But the script cares little for their labours, except as an excuse for her to meet Guy, the impossibly handsome and charming industrial magnate played by The Mentalist’s Simon Baker. Like the scary-thin Byrne (who teeters uneasily on high heels), Baker’s an Australian; she goes Brit here while he’s rather arbitrarily American. Another Yank on the scene is the goofily appealing Anna Faris’s Chloe, a bohemian aid worker who accidentally dumped Josh and now regrets it.

      The movie sticks to this rom-com geometry, squared on an assumption that these are the only sexually available 30-somethings in a glitzily filmed, mostly wintry London. There are other Judd Apatow–meets–Richard Curtis characters, but they don’t register much. There’s Nat’s nasty sister (Minnie Driver), who utters the pessimistic title; the usual crazy couples therapist (Olivia Colman) who attempts to “help” them make it even that long; and Josh’s reliably rude best friend (Ricky Gervais crony Stephen Merchant)—such a close pal that he only appears at the film’s start and finish.

      There are a few laughs as the calendar turns, mostly in sharp throwaway lines, but apart from the blameless Chloe, the film offers zero reasons to root for any of these people, together or apart. I’d give it a miss.

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