The Accidental Husband
There’s so much wrong with The Accidental Husband you hardly know where to start. The jokes fall painfully flat, there’s almost zero chemistry between the characters, and the initial premise - that you can get someone else hitched with just a few clicks of a mouse - is so far-fetched, it’s a struggle to give your attention to its numerous ramifications.
Uma Thurman, who also produced, plays Emma, a self-titled ‘love doctor’ who has made a career for herself trying to sort out other people’s relationship woes, but despite a hit radio show and bestselling book on the subject, she has a few problems keeping her own love-life in check. She is engaged to Richard (Colin Firth), her well-off and eminently sensible fiancé, but things come a cropper when discovers that she is already listed as legally married when she goes to register at the City Hall.
Richard wants to bring in lawyers to sort out the bureaucratic foul-up, but Emma believes her own, no-nonsense approach will succeed in getting the required papers that will allow her and Richard to marry. How wrong could she be? The man to whom she is already listed as married turns out to be hunky fireman Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose easygoing charm quickly melts Emma’s icy exterior.
Naturally the two fall for each other, and poor Firth is stuck with the part he’s been playing for the last ten years - the gentlemanly cuckold. He has all the stiff upper lip of Darcy with none of his hidden depths.
Thurman throws herself into her agony-aunt role with gusto, but her tortured performance struggles to tease out a single laugh, whilst Morgan is just a boring bit of rough - his second dismal romantic role since the pitiful P.S. I Love You.
Put bluntly, The Accidental Husband is a total flop from start to finish. For a more engaging romantic comedy try Definitely Maybe.
