Top End Wedding bottoms out early
Australian-made Top End Wedding is packaged as an attractive present. But with a stinker of a script, a big fat chunk of sitcom ham and a dithering dipstick for a love interest, this gift is one you’ll want to give away.
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It cannot be denied that the Australian-made Top End Wedding has been packaged as a most attractive present.
However, no sooner you unwrap the thing, you realise you’ve been re-gifted a tired old get-’em-to-the-church-on-time comedy that has already been in circulation for way too long.
The first hour is a big fat chunk of sit-com ham that even a canned-laughter machine would have trouble chuckling at.
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Poorly written and, for the most part, tackily acted, the first two acts of Top End Wedding recall those bad old days of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
This was the era where many an Australian movie comedy upped and died after mistakenly assuming local audiences were dumb as bricks and would settle for anything.
Sure, Top End Wedding does improve quite a bit once it rounds the home turn for a crowd-pleasing exchange of vows. However, in the eyes of many, it will have already run its race by then.
If only more time had been spent freshening up the script - which can be a real stinker at times - then the end results would have been at least a lot more tolerable.
Let’s cut to the story, then. Ambitious Adelaide lawyer and former Tiwi Islander Lauren (Miranda Tapsell) needs to head home to get married quick to her slow-witted British boyfriend Ned (Gwilym Lee).
He’s just lost his job, and hasn’t got around to telling her. She’s just misplaced her mum (Ursula Yovich), and hasn’t got the faintest idea where she might be.
Neither has Lauren’s depressed dad (Huw Higginson), who is too busy grotesquely weeping in his pantry to go off and look for his missing missus.
Meanwhile, with the big day advancing like the onset of a minor head cold, the movie coughs and splutters its way through the usual pre-nuptial prevarications and prefabricated cliches.
Top End Wedding might have got away with some of this needlessly inane material had Tapsell and Lee clicked as a couple worth caring about.
Sadly, Ned is a yammering caricature of a fish-out-of-water foreigner, so it makes no sense why the straight-shooting Lauren is getting hitched to this dithering dipstick.
Everything lifts noticeably once we finally bear witness to the rich beauty, wonder and atmosphere of the Tiwis.
However, a great final destination cannot erase the memory of a grating trip en route.
TOP END WEDDING (M)
Rating: One and a half stars (1.5 out of 5)
Director: Wayne Blair (The Sapphires)
Starring: Miranda Tapsell, Gwilym Lee, Kerry Fox, Huw Higginson, Ursula Yovich.
You can now go ahead and miss this bride
For all things movies, follow Leigh on Twitter: @leighpaatsch
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