The Accidental Husband (Uma Thurman)

(Amazon UK link)

From time to time I check Amazon’s recommendations, read reviews, and - if I think I’d like a book or DVD - add it to my wishlist. I do this more with films than I do with books, since I know already which authors I like. I think Amazon probably makes recommendations based partly on genre, and partly on actors. This one has Colin Firth as one of the main three characters, and I’ve certainly liked other films where he takes a major role.

So I put it on my wishlist, and was given it, along with some other DVDs, for Christmas. We decided to watch it a couple of days later.

The star of ‘The Accidental Husband’ is Uma Thurman, an actress I know nothing about although I saw her in another film a few years ago. She plays the role of Dr Emma Lloyd, a radio presenter in New York. She doesn’t read the news or play records, however; her speciality is offering romantic relationship advice to listeners who phone in with problems. She’s popular with a lot of women, and is engaged to be married to Richard (Colin Firth).

All seems to be going smoothly in Emma’s life; but she’s not so popular with the ex-boyfriend of one her listeners. Patrick (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) decides to take an unusual form of revenge, with the help of a young geeky friend. And so, when Emma and Richard go to register their intention to marry, they discover something so bizarre that she’s convinced it must be a mistake…

The film is billed as a romantic comedy, and there were certainly one or two amusing moments in the film. It’s mostly quite light-hearted, and it made a good evening’s viewing. I was a little disappointed in the outcome; it was inevitable from fairly early in the film, but towards the end I began to hope I might have been wrong...

I felt a little sorry for Colin Firth, once again cast as a solid, dependable and ultimately dull kind of guy, while Patrick, a brave firefighter, is supposedly a romantic hero. I didn’t find him at all endearing; from his passive aggression as he takes his ‘revenge’, to a decidedly gross cake-tasting scene where he talks with his mouth full and behaves in an embarrassing way. There’s also a scene where he makes another character drunk, although he then behaves well afterwards.

However, the film is well-made, with an unusual storyline and some subplots I wasn’t expecting. There are some nice scenes with Emma's father, bizarrely known as 'Wilder' (Sam Shepard). On the whole we enjoyed the film, and I'd recommend it in a low-key way for anyone who likes this genre.

The rating is 12A (PG-13 in the US), which I thought about right. There’s one instance of ‘strong’ language, a non-explicit bedroom scene (and brief mention of it after the event) and I don’t recall any violence. I can’t imagine it would be of the slightest interest to anyone under the age of about fifteen.

Review copyright 2017 Sue's DVD Reviews