Film Review | A Few Best Men

Will the vapid shenanigans of equally shallow and emotionally stunted boy-children ever cease to pull in large crowds to the cinemas, for whatever reason?

If the success of The Hangover franchise is anything to go by, we could be in for a fresh onslaught of 'frat boy' comedies about the misadventures of fully grown men acting way below their age for quite a while.

And so, given that there are few things more disheartening than a grim prediction becoming reality - even with the ego-boosting balm of that prediction being your own - it is with a heavy heart, dear readers, that I am forced to deliver a po-faced condemnation of the latest addition to that ever-expanding drama.

Any innovations found in A Few Best Men - an Australian-British production first released in 2011 - are purely cosmetic... in fact, if any arise at all they do chiefly by dint of that most inconsequential of storytelling features - the backdrop.

Sure enough, the story begins in an exotic locale - a tropical island, to be precise, where we quickly find out that a British tourist (and orphan) David (Xavier Samuel) has decided to propose to a young Australian beauty, Mia (Laura Best) whom he was a stranger to less than a fortnight ago.

Back in England, David's 'only family' - a trio of friends consisting of the rakish Tom (Kris Marshall), the neurotic Graham (Kevin Bishop) and dumped-and-depressed Luke (Tim Draxl) - are worried that this commitment is too sudden... though more than anything, they're concerned about losing a friend to another continent, especially after they discover that Mia insists on hosting the wedding Down Under.

Barely emerging from the long-haul flight unscathed, the foursome discover that David might just have bitten off more than he can chew.

In David's own words, it looks as if he's "marrying a Kennedy", because it turns out that Mia's family is not only well off, but that its patriarch Jim (Jonathan Biggins) is an influential - if eccentric - senator, and that he intends to bequeath his position to his daughter.

But as his friends prepare for the stag night (the animal reference is all the more poignant in this case - see below), they unwittingly make it as hard as possible for David to make a good impression on Jim and Mia's mother Barbara (Olivia Newton-John).

While it's somewhat refreshing to see doormat-nice-guy-from-Love, Actually Kris Marshall play against type here - being the up-for it cool guy of the gang - and while the beautiful Australian locales offer a tinge we may not have seen before in other films in the drunken-man-child-misadventure genre, the fact remains that, well, that's about it as far as something fresh is concerned.

The excuse of the undemanding filmgoer is that disposable fare like this can at least serve as light entertainment to pass the time or relax the nerves, but if what you're seeing in front of you is just a lazy re-tread of the stuff you've seen before, surely your eyes will simply glaze over as the tired cavalcade of clichés invades the screen?

The main problem here is that there is very little plot, and even any real sense of camaraderie between the characters, to justify being presented with an assembly line of freakish exploits.

The Hangover had a tiger. Here, we get Jim's trusty sheep. Yep, you guessed it, 'Ramsey' is routinely humiliated and transformed into a MacGuffin to help move the lumbering plot forward. And when it doesn't, a sub-plot involving a misplaced cache of drugs (always handy, right?) turns up to help, with a crazed dealer in tow (in what is actually a promisingly deranged performance by Steve Le Marquand).

I have said it before and I will say it again - just because your subject matter is trashy, it doesn't mean you're allowed to be lazy. And let's not forget that often, whatever is easier or least demanding to watch is usually the most laborious to put together.

Here, you get the sense that director Stephan Elliott and screenwriter Dean Craig are simply coasting on the coattails of a genre that's becoming as drained and lifeless as the 'found footage' horror genre.