REVIEW
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 The Accidental Husband
2008
Certificate: 12 | Runtime: 91 | Director: Griffin Dunne
Starring: Uma Thurman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Colin Firth
 
Dr. Emma Lloyd (Thurman) hosts a popular radio show in which she hands out relationship advice. After a call to her show, Sofia (Justina Machado) decides not to go ahead with her planned marriage to New York firefighter Patrick Sullivan (Morgan). Furious, and seeking revenge, Patrick uses a computer whizz friend to hack into the New York marriage database and 'marry' him to Emma. Emma finds out just as she is about to marry Richard (Firth), and seeks an annulment from Patrick. However, he's not going to grant it that easily, and the incredible circumstances might just change the way Patrick and Emma feel about each other.
One could say a lot of bad things about The Accidental Husband. One is that it's not at all romantic, and another would be that it's not funny in the slightest, either. It's also very badly cast, flatly directed, and uninspiringly acted. But all these things pale into insignificance next to the overriding fact that the whole thing just rings unbearably false at all times. It is a film in which things happen, not because the characters, dialogue and story cause them to, but because genre dictates that they do. It is a film with a set ending, and which really doesn't care how it gets there, so long as it does.
Uma Thurman continues to prove that she's wrong for this type of role. She's a good actress, and is capable of many things, but a transformation from unlikeable to loveable is not one of them. She radiates coldness, which works well for the first part of the film where Emma is a bitch. But she struggles to mould Emma into a more sympathetic and likeable individual as Patrick, inevitably, starts to fall for her. It's not all Thurman's fault, mind you. One of the great weaknesses of the script (Mimi Hare, Clare Naylord and Bonnie Sikowitz) is its failure to actually show Emma and Patrick developing feelings. We see the characters go through the motions of falling in love, but we can never see why. Neither of them develop satisfactorily, and their complicated emotions seem to spring from nowhere. As I have said, the film wants to arrive at the happy ending without even allowing us the courtesy of seeing how it gets there.
For his part, Morgan is marginally better. He has a degree of natural charm, but charm isn't enough to make a whole character. It's tricky to buy into the notion of somebody falling in love with the person who ruined his marriage, especially in the short space of time the film presents us with. And it's also rather hard to understand what Patrick sees in Emma. Again, we see the motions of a romance, but never the feelings or reasoning behind it. It just seems so forced and obligatory. The only person who really seems suited to their role is Firth, who has practically made a career out of playing the cuckold. I appreciated that the film didn't try to make Richard into a complete jerk, though it does spend a lot of time poking fun at him. But the fact is that one decent tertiary character cannot compensate for a central romance that never, ever rings true.
A word on the comedy. Films like this need light-hearted moments, but pretty much every one in The Accidental Husband falls flat. Emma hits her head about half a dozen times; Patrick has a nutty Indian friend, and he can be rude and boorish in an 'amusing' fashion. That's really all it has to offer on this front and, with the romance not gelling, the characters straying as far away from likeable as possible, and with an ending that serves as a relief from the inevitable more than anything else, The Accidental Husband really is quite a stinker.© David Mercier
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