Starring: Rosamund Pike, David Tennant, Billy Connolly
To date, writers/directors Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton are perhaps best known for the BBC sit-com Outnumbered, which followed the everyday lives of a suburban family with a heavy slant towards improvisation. In retrospect, the recently finished series was a good show. What We Did On Our Holiday follows different characters played by different actors, but is to an extent, Outnumbered: The Movie.
Hamilton and Jenkin haven't stepped outside their comfort zone here, and so it does feel like they're playing it safe and going back to the same old material and it's not as strong as Outnumbered, which was a very funny show. Still, it does hold enough humour for it to be better than a lot of the recent comedies I've seen and its family-friendly softness provides a certain level of comfort. It's lightweight, even schmaltzy at times, but the wit rises above the sentimentality.
A married couple played by Rosamund Pike and David Tennant, take their children to the Scottish highlands to celebrate the birthday of Tennant's dad, played by Billy Connolly. He is terminally ill, but is unaware that his son and daughter-in-law have separated. All the while, the children tie these two plot points together. David Tennant is one of Britain's most celebrated actors of the moment and Rosamund Pike is seemingly on the verge of a long-awaited Hollywood breakthrough, being very busy as of late working with Pierce Brosnan (A Long Way Down, continuing their collaboration with Pike's Bond breakthrough in Die Another Day) and Simon Pegg (Hector And The Search For Happiness) or, in fact, both actors (The World's End) as well,as the upcoming Gone Girl promising big things.
This is however, Billy Connolly's movie and he delivers the best performance, mostly through anchoring a film with fairly broad comedy but going (mostly) against his reputation for being fairly broad comedian. His performance is a soft but amusing one, full of warmth. The children are all likeable characters, but I felt the "slice of life" realism that made Outnumbered strong was being discarded here, to the film's detriment. Another film may have made the plot fascinating, but given the parameters of what we're used to from Jenkin and Hamilton, it comes off as unbelievable...in a bad way. That said, this film has charm and one-liners that will keep you smiling for some time after the film's over. It's a nice trip, but you wouldn't want to stay there.
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