Love Actually, Richard Curtis’ ode to Christmas, love and just being nice to people, has been ripped apart by Honest Trailers for doing all of the above. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. You can check out the delightful critique below.
Despite the fact that it possesses solid laughs, a heart so large that it should probably seek medical attention, and a bare-faced Andrew Lincoln before he went metal and started killing zombies, there is one pretty big reason that we should all really hate Love Actually: all of the bloody rip-offs that it inspired. As Honest Trailers explains, without Love Actually we wouldn’t have been inundated with the likes of New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day - both of which basically revolve around a dozen famous people falling in love on a holiday, but without the whimsical charm of Richard Curtis’ original. I don’t know if you can tell yet but I kind of have a soft spot for Love Actually. Despite this slight devotion to Richard Curtis’ endearing tale, however I’m man enough to admit that there are flaws dotted throughout his convoluted romantic jaunt. And as Honest Trailers points out, the fact that we see the always amicable Alan Rickman fall out of love with his wife, played by the preposterously adorable Emma Thompson, means that Love Actually isn’t always that lovely.
When you think about it, Love Actually's eight plot points - which, as Honest Trailers delightfully points out, means that it akin to "Pulp Fiction for girls" - are for the most part really, really creepy and depressing. For example, Andrew Lincoln is secretly in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, portrayed by Keira Knightley. He even has the audacity to reveal his true feelings to her rather than keeping then hidden. But rather than being repulsed by this admission she decides to give him a smooch, which would surely only encourage his adulation and tease him along even further. The bitch.
Then Liam Neeson’s character helps his stepson get over the death of his mother by helping him seduce a young girl who has the same first name of the recently deceased. That’s just weird. But there’s more. Laura Linney decides to care for her violently unstable brother rather than getting it on with her single and mind-bendingly attractive co-worker. Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister actually fires an employee for kissing the U.S. President. There’s definitely something illegal in there somewhere. Then Colin Firth goes to extreme lengths, such as learning a new language and flying on a whim to a new country, just to bang his ex-maid.
And yes it also features basically every single movie cliché in the book and is so overly long yet predictable that you can slip into a coma and still wake up not lost, with 20 minutes to go. And yet despite all these problems, it's still pretty hard not to love.
