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MSRP 29.98
RATED PG
STUDIO MPI Home Video
RUNNING TIME 89 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES
• Interviews
• Deleted Scene
• FX Shot
• Trailer
The Pitch
When the wedding of internationally famous film star Lara to English author James is sabotaged by a paparazzo, they decide to relocate the event to the remote Scottish island of Hegg. But the press will not be so easily shaken, and the couple has to take more drastic measures to ensure their privacy. Enter local girl Katie , who’s selected as a decoy bride to lure the press off the trail. But when Katie meets James, sparks fly, dresses get ruined and suddenly love gets complicated.
The Humans
Sheree Folkson (director), Kelly Macdonald, David Tennant, Alice Eve and Federico Castelluccio
The Nutshell
A completely predictable romcom that doesn’t know the audience it is meant for.
The Lowdown
The Decoy Bride has a cast whose list of credits include starring roles in Doctor Who, Boardwalk Empire, Sopranos and Entourage. The scenery is good too.
They look bored. The chemistry much have been left in some other time that Dr Who will need to find.
Now that I’m done giving praise where it is due, it is time to talk about a film that will be lost on this site. We are not the ideal audience for this film, but if it was good, it would be recommended all the same. One of the biggest problems this film has is that it doesn’t have a true audience. But then, it wasn’t good. Not even close. It has a bunch of easily foretold drab jokes that barely get a chuckle. Half of them resort to cheap potty humor not too far removed from an Adam Sandler film, except this one stars David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald. Two performers that obviously needed the money and whored themselves out to the first pay that came along.
Worse is the fact that somehow this film has a PG rating. That means it should be pleasing or at least not offensive to share with children. It’s not. Quite a bit of sexual innuendo and bad language make this a film I choose to discard before my daughter is old enough to want to watch it, if only to see the beautiful scenery.
Is she running from a screening of the finished film?
Even before I was a parent, I couldn’t stand films marketed at children that take the easy way out and resort to toilet humor. It may aggravate me much more than it should but I feel if you market a film as a quality family rom com it should adhere as such. There is a lot of Adam Sandler quality humor in here (not exactly funny or appealing, but generally somewhat child friendly) but various circumstances drop below Sandler humor. Maybe Happy Madison is looking for a foreign film to make domestic (because we all know people just don’t understand Irish), and they can plop him right into Tenants part and have Rob Schneider play the photographer. I doubt they would even have to change the script at all. It would make a 100 million dollars too, but that another gripe for another time.
Do the characters have story arcs? Yes, but only two of them are rewarding as the other two leads are shrugged off for the majority of the film. What we are left with are a couple that within the span of 8 hours change all the decisions they have previously made in life. This only works in surreal environments, not in stories that attempt to have some basis in reality.
I would hide my head too.
I personally hate films where a person who is recognized as having performed a great act (writing a bestselling novel) then turns out to be a complete hack. MacDonald constantly quotes a book Tenant supposedly wrote, but he doesn’t even remember situations in the book. I can understand forgetting the actual words, but the plot? I am hoping to forget the polt of this film just as easily.
Such a sad fate for Furio.
The Package
No joke, they include one very padded deleted scene that has 2 minutes of setup for 15 seconds of deleted footage. They also included some pretty basic special features like a BTS featurette, a trailer and some interviews. The only thing of real interest though is watching the digital transformation of the set in a feature called FX Shot.
Rating: 
Out of a Possible 5 Stars
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