Love, Rosie review: fake-Irish rom com bomb

Before getting stuck into this awful (though pretty) adaptation of Cecilia Ahern's epistolary novel Where Rainbow's End, let us consider one emblematic incident from the film's latter sections. An unlikable character receives a letter he doesn't want his wife ever to see. After sneaking the envelope into his pocket, he locks it in a drawer that, in the fullness of time, his partner will eventually force open.

Throw it away! Set fire to it! Feed it to the dog! It’s almost as if you’re being manipulated by a half-written script that can’t be bothered to solve even the most basic narrative conundrum. The entire film is weighed down by such sloppy storytelling and by equally disordered characterisation.

This is the one about the lifelong friends who take too long to realise they should be romantically entwined. The perfectly charming Lilly Collins stars as Rosie, a young woman who, weeks before she is due to head for a dream job in Boston, falls pregnant by the handsome guy she's not supposed to be with (Christian Cooke). The handsome guy she is supposed to be with (Sam Claflin) does, indeed, make his way to the US.

This is a binary universe. Everyone is either a good egg or a total shit. Fair enough. The problem is that the three main shits (two women and one man) are all scooped from the same bucket. Each is overdressed, preening and joyless. None of this, of course, stops the good eggs from romancing each identical shit in succession. The story’s demands will not be resisted.

Domestic viewers may, however, be too distracted by the weird shift in location to pay much attention to plot or character. Love, Rosie was shot in Dublin, but, somewhere in the production process, the city has become an unidentified English town. Red post boxes sit on D6 streets. The Shelbourne and St Stephen's Green are now somewhere else.

Maybe Dublin collectively dissociated itself from the project. Who’d blame it?