“Some
kind of beautiful disaster.”
Pierce Brosnan stars as an English “romantics” fellow and
serial womanizer in Some Kind of
Beautiful, previously known as How to
Make Love Like an Englishman. Written by Matthew Newman and directed by
Tom Vaughan, the film is a highly-sexist and offensive romantic comedy about a
60-year-old playboy who found love and redemption in two American half-sisters.
Richard Haig (Pierce Brosnan) is a renowned literature
professor at Cambridge whose teaching styles are influenced by his arrogant and
hypercritical retired father, Gordon (Malcolm McDowell). He has one terrible
habit – sleeping with his students. When his latest girlfriend, American
student Kate (Jessica Alba), becomes pregnant, Richard leaves behind his
English life and flies to Los Angeles with her.
Jake (Duncan Joiner), their son, is born but later, Kate
falls in love with the younger and richer Brian (Ben McKenzie). With parenting complications
happening, Olivia (Salma Hayek), a writer and Kate’s Mexican sister from a bigamist
father, comes in to lend a helping hand. Eventually, she observes Richard’s infallible
commitment to his son despite the old man’s womanizing habits. Without a wife
or a decent job, Richard soon faces deportation.
Some Kind of
Beautiful fails in many aspects. As a romantic film, it is formulaic and
desperate. It is anxious to pair up Richard with Olivia and reunite him with
his son in order to fulfil the usual happy ending and search for the one great
love recipes. As a comedy, it is witless and unfunny. Some jokes and physical gags
are amusing, but mostly tasteless sand nasty.
The movie centers around Richard, his insufferable ego, narcissistic
viewpoints and various moral shortcomings. At sixty, he still has daddy issues and
childish tendencies. The film appears as a hodgepodge of lost old man
conventions. The bigger problem is that the movie is not able to make Richard
likable or lovable even after all his sacrifices and efforts. With so much
focus on Richard, the script thinly sketched the other characters, particularly
the leading ladies who have reduced to nothing but mere accessories for Richard.
This makes the film offensively chauvinistic as the women, naked or in their
panties, are only present to feed Richard’s amusements.
Final analysis tells that there is shortage of sincerity or
even attention to storytelling. Scenes are unnatural and the hurried climax forces
everyone to reconcile and forgive each other. The film is also filled with
depressing and dim-witted scenes like Olivia mimicking male orgasms, Richard offering
marijuana after his alcohol rehab class, and Richard’s peeing bonding moment with
his son and father. It is even naïve in portraying academic settings with
Richard’s outmoded self-serving teaching style and sudden tenure to a prestigious
university after simple words.
The lame material is left for the cast to work on. Brosnan,
despite appearing flabby, has natural charisma as a leading man. Yet, this is
not enough as he painstakingly struggles to make his ridiculous character entertaining.
Alba and Hayek are also natural charmers but their enthusiasm is just wasted, especially
Hayek who has to make those various orgasmic sounds.
Some Kind of
Beautiful is badly written and directed. Its solidly delightful cast is
helpless against its repulsive and bigot narrative.
Production company: Saban Films, Lionsgate
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Jessica Alba, Duncan
Joiner, Malcolm McDowell, Ben McKenzie, Marlee Matlin, Ivan Sergei, Fred
Melamed
Director: Tom Vaughan
Screenwriter: Matthew Newman
Producers: Richard Barton Lewis, Beau St. Clair, Kevin
Frakes, Raj Brinder Singh
Director of photography: David Tattersall
Production design: John Collins
Editor: Matthew Friedman
Music: Stephen Endelman,
David Newman
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