Every other Hollywood comedy seems to be either directed or produced by Judd Apatow these days and those he produces aren’t nearly as good as those he directs. This one has Jason Segel as its writer and star and Nicholas Stoller as director. Do not expect the originality of either The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up.
Segel plays Peter, a musician who writes television scores for a show in which his girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell) stars. He’s the guy holding her handbag in the background as she does interviews with the press. He comes stark naked out of the shower one day to be told first that she wants to end it and second that she’s found someone else.
That someone else turns out to be none other than our own Russell Brand. He plays another musician, who sings better than our hero, if not like a lark.
Peter finds this out on a weepy holiday at a dreadful tourist resort in Hawaii.
He has come to forget about the failed relationship — but finds his ex and her new lover already installed in the hotel, hammering away at each other in bed like there was no tomorrow.
Luckily, however, he finds sympathy and finally sex with Mila Kunis’s guest receptionist but then, of course, his original love comes running back to him, possibly exhausted by Mr Brand. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is more like When Harry Met Sally than Knocked Up, though Segel gives himself some good lines and presents us with a moderately likeable semi-slob, who is undone by love. And if the girls are fairly amorphous,
Brand shows what he can do in this sort of caper, either by over-playing amusingly or just being his usual comedy self.
Maybe you'll like this clearly overstretched rom-com more than I did, but you’ll be disappointed if you expect more than a modicum of wit.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Cert: 15
