It's hard to make a movie that boasts a drugged-up sheep wearing lipstick derivative but that's what A Few Best Men managed. This third rate Richard Curtis wedding comedy that can be summed up thus: Meet The Aussie Parents During The Hangover. Have I made that sound watchable? Sorry.
Brit Xavier Samuel (Twilight's Riley) meets Aussie Laura Brent (don't know her) on holidays and they decide to get married. This doesn't go down too well with Xavier's mates - lad Kris Marshall, mopey Kevin Bishop and heartbroken Tim Draxl - but they agree to fly Down Under for the wedding. Over the course of the stag night and wedding day, drunken best men, coked-up substitute best men, embarrassing speeches, shotgun-wielding drug dealers, a frisky mother of the bride and a lost prized sheep conspire to cause havoc.
A Few Best Men is not terrible - Kris Marshall has got real charm and no one was expecting Olivia Newton John to do a few lines of cocaine - it's just it's so lazy, as if written solely to have those wacky 'this isn’t that it looks like' trailer moments. One such moment has someone walk in on the groom pulling cocaine from the ass of a sheep while the best man stands nearby with a gun; there's the post-stag 'what the hell happened' situation as the revellers wake up wearing gimp masks and have ornaments sticking out of their bums. And there's the classic 'trying to distract someone when some lunacy is happening right outside the window' (here, a sheep is lowered from an upstairs window). Okay, so it's terrible.
Like The Expendables 2, this is a movie you've seen a hundred times before. It's spot the rip off: there's a bit from The Hangover, there's a bit from Meet The Parents, there's a bit from Wedding Crashers, etc. It also has that annoying 'remember when' sit-com humour where friends talk of past in-jokes:
Kevin Bishop: I've had girlfriends.
Kris Marshall: Inflatable ones don't count.
Kevin Bishop: I told you that was delivered by mistake.
Predictable. Old. Lesbians are described as muff munchers. Enough said.