Film review: The Decoy Bride

IF THIS film isn’t at a cinema near you, fear not: it’s heading to your DVD shop within the week, and if its extras include a deleted scenes section, you could have quite a debilitating drinking game based around the number of times the filmmakers mourn that trimming “x” or “y” “broke my heart”.

In a script so heavily cut it could be a paper doily, what’s left is vaguely cute, rather predictable and wholly insubstantial.

David Tennant stars as an English writer whose first novel is eclipsed by his relationship with fabulously famous Hollywood superstar Lara Tyler (Alice Eve). After their latest attempt to marry ends abruptly with the bride-to-be uncovering a snapper hiding in the church organ, they decide to escape to the remote island of Hegg, and when the press follow, Lara’s agent (Michael Urie of Ugly Betty) hires a local girl to divert them.

The only single available woman on the island is Katie (Kelly Macdonald), recently ditched by a musician boyfriend who told her she’s “just one song – not an entire album”. She and Tennant like each other, then loathe each other, then fall for each other in a series of changes of heart that suggest arrhythmia.

Scriptwriter Sally Phillips has a wealth of cultural possibilities to draw on, and a cast who should know their way around a comedy, including Maureen Beattie and Tony Roper. But whatever the original intentions, this is a doodle of a film, offering a few vignettes about local crafts (villagers selling stones with faces and wool hair stuck on), artistic vanity (Tennant is wounded when the Hegg book club give his novel the thumbs-down) and our eternal love-hate relationship with bagpipes. Worse yet, the film’s lack of bounce keeps getting underlined by a jaunty guitar which cruelly reminds us of the fun we aren’t having.

The film gets points for dodging the easy cliché of portraying Lara as a spoilt celeb, but she’s not much of a character either. And during the film’s longeurs you might ask yourself what has happened to Tennant, who graduated from foxy (in both senses) star of appointment TV for all but the most Dalek-allergic to an underpowered movie career that includes Fright Night, St Trinian’s 2 and now this poor man’s Notting Hill.

Tennant and Eve will survive this island that laughs forgot, but only Macdonald comes through with any credit. When the film manages a few pokes at emotion, it’s usually down to her wistful, self-deprecating presence. You can’t help but wish her a happy ending – but not in a shotgun arrangement like The Decoy Bride.

Siobhan Synnot

On general release from Friday