‘Almost Married’ Review

Stars: Philip McGinley, Emily Atack, Bill Fellows, Val McLane, Lynne Wilmot | Written and Directed by Ben Cookson

It’s Kyle’s stag night. He’s with his best friend and best man Jarvis. Large amounts of alcohol are consumed. What could possibly go wrong? After a trip to a brothel… sorry, “Massage parlour”, Kyle finds himself in an awkward situation. He has contracted chlamydia from one of the employees of the fine establishment and now has to not have sex with his fiancée for three months to prevent any possibility of it spreading or worse, her finding out what he has done.

Almost Married is a British romantic comedy starring Philip McGinley as the lead man, Kyle. Filled with crude ‘lad’ humour, Kyle and Jarvis stumble from drunken night to drunken night as they try many different solutions to avoid revealing Kyle’s secret. This includes long fishing trips and “damaging” body parts (Yes, that body part) to keep Kyle out of his Fiancée Lydia’s (Emily Atack) presence and bed. Not a film to shy away, including full frontal male nudity and a strangely graphic vomit explosion after a drunken night out, the film jumps between sex jokes and dark humour to try and keep its audience hooked.

Whether it achieves this however, is a different matter. Although the humour was meant to be crude, I found it quite childish at best. I rarely found myself actually laughing and, more often than not, found myself cringing and checking my watch. I could see how the film was trying to be funny, and maybe it isn’t my type of humour which is why I struggled to be entertained by it.

Strangely, I found the ‘bromance’ between Kyle and Jarvis a more realistic relationship then that between Kyle and Lydia. This definitely played against the story as a whole, making the viewer not really feel the impact on the nearly-married couple’s relationship that Kyle’s cheating should have put across. Instead I found myself shrugging non-committally as Kyle desperately tried to save a relationship that I didn’t feel really worked in the first place.

Overall, a not spectacular result from this film and not one that I will be planning on seeing again in the future.

Almost Married is released on DVD on April 7th.