A Perfect Plan - Movie Review

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

The French don't always get the balance right in their farcical romantic comedies, but they usually win us over with goofy charm. Alas, the plan never quite comes together this time. A combination of wildly improbable plotting and odd casting choices makes everything feel so contrived that we end up not caring what will happen. Although it's impossible not to smile.

In Paris, Isabelle (Diane Kruger) has finally decided to marry her handsome fellow dentist Pierre (Robert Plagnol). But there's a problem: in her family, the first marriages never work out. So her sister Coco (Alice Pol) concocts a plan that Isabelle will fly to Copenhagen to marry and divorce in an hour, so Pierre becomes the more successful husband No 2. On the flight to Denmark, she meets loutish travel writer Jean-Yves (Dany Boon), and when her plans go awry she follows him to Nairobi, intending to trick him into a quickie wedding there. But of course, nothing goes as planned, and now Isabelle needs to track down Jean-Yves in Moscow to sort out the mess.

It's impossible to believe anything that happens in this film, as Isabelle somehow does all this globe-hopping without arousing Pierre's suspicion or jeopardising their successful dental practice. Even more ridiculous are adventures she has face-to-face with a lion in the Serengeti or drunkenly dancing in a Russian nightclub. But these things might not be a problem if Isabelle and Jean-Yves weren't such a mismatched pair.

Regardless of Kruger's gung-ho performance (she dives into even the most inane slapstick with sparky energy), Boon's character is such an idiot that we never want them to get together. Especially when she has the dreamy Pierre back home. So the screenwriters contrive to change their personalities to force our loyalties to shift. They also get Kruger and Boon to generate some offhanded chemistry that seems to surprise even them. Yes, this script forces the already shaky rom-com structure into contortions no actor could salvage. And yet, if we're willing to suspend our critical faculties, the film musters up just enough charm to catch us off guard in the end.

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Facts and Figures

Year: 2012

Genre: Foreign

Run time: 104 mins

In Theaters: Wednesday 31st October 2012

Reviews

Contactmusic.com: 2.5 / 5

Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
Fresh: 6 Rotten: 13

IMDB: 6.3 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director: Pascal Chaumeil

Producer: Nicolas Duval-Adassovsky, Laurent Zeitoun, Yann Zenou

Screenwriter: Laurent Zeitoun, Yoann Gromb

Also starring: Diane Kruger, Dany Boon, Jonathan Cohen