REVIEWED - THE LAST KISS: 'WE all make choices," the poster shouts. "What's yours?" Allow me to offer a few suggestions. The Departed. Children of Men. Watching the telly. Cutting your nails. Colonic irrigation, writes Donald Clarke
This disquietingly ill-defined American remake of an unremarkable Italian romantic drama is far from the worst film in our cinemas, but it is surely among the most gruelling to sit through. At one stage a warring couple - one of several - decide to part for the sake of their new baby. Listening to a man and a woman bawl at one another is, they suggest, no way for a child to spend his formative years.
Well, I know how the poor tyke feels. After enduring nearly two hours of whining, bickering and name-calling, the reasonable viewer of The Last Kiss may feel he or she has lived through several awful childhoods in one dizzying evening.
Scripted by Paul Haggis, writer of Million Dollar Baby and Crash, the film brings us among a huddle of worried midwesterners coping poorly with the onset of their 30s. Zach Braff plays an architect - we're all architects these days, recent movies suggest - who decides to embark on an affair with a student just as his long-term girlfriend announces she's pregnant. Elsewhere, one buddy has taken to stalking his former lover, another is continuing to enjoy the carefree life and a third is exchanging insults with his increasingly irascible wife.
Anybody who endured the surprisingly grim domestic brawl that was The Break Up will have some idea what to expect from The Last Kiss. As in that Jennifer Aniston vehicle, the lesson here seems to be that men are lascivious bastards and women are irrational fruitcakes. As in the earlier film, there is some good acting and plenty of sharp observations from the frontline of the gender wars.
But, once again, we are left puzzled as to what exactly it is we are looking at. The picture is too grim to be a comedy, too trivial to be viewed as a drama, doesn't have enough songs to be a musical, and features too few car crashes to qualify as an action film. Make your choice accordingly.
