Could filmmaker Stephan Elliott please explain?

STEPHAN Elliott's new film, A Few Best Men, might look like a smart romantic comedy but it's more an exercise in crude farce.

A Few Best Men

MORE than once in A Few Best Men, Stephan Elliott's new Australian comedy, someone enters a room to discover David (Xavier Samuel) in a compromising situation.

"It isn't what it looks like," David protests on these occasions - and that's true enough.

It may look as if he's engaged in amorous foreplay with a sheep, but in fact he's administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It may look as if the sheep is wearing lipstick and dressed in drag, but there's an explanation for that as well. "It isn't what it looks like" might be a fair description of Elliott's film. A Few Best Men might look like a smart romantic comedy until we discover that it's more an exercise in crude farce; it may look like a worthy successor to The Hangover until it proves, on closer inspection, to be a jumble of overdrawn characters with a wildly improbable story.

I have nothing against crude farce and overdrawn characters. After all, Elliott made his reputation by exploiting that very formula. In its best moments, A Few Best Men has the same outrageous energy and concentrated lewdness that Elliott brought to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert all those years ago, and its trio of clowns and misfits may be almost as funny at the three drag queens on their bus tour of outback Australia.

It's true Priscilla was greatly helped by its soundtrack, but A Few Best Men isn't far behind in that department either. Elliott offers a lively selection of retro-pops, many sung by Olivia Newton-John, and for good measure has Newton-John in one of the film's funniest scenes. Add some picturesque Blue Mountains scenery, a pretty-as-pink heroine (Laura Brent) who could almost pass for Cate Blanchett in a silent movie, and some not-so-subtle digs at British gormlessness and pretension, and this glossy-looking Anglo-Australian co-production might turn out to be a hit.

It belongs to the well-established "posh weddings going awfully wrong" genre. Sadly disrupted wedding ceremonies have been a feature of Hollywood comedy since It Happened One Night, with Robert Altman giving us the definitive dissection of nuptial chaos in his delightful (and somewhat neglected) 1978 film A Wedding, made in the days when society weddings were taken more seriously than they are today. In an age when marriage itself is widely spurned and derided (except, of course, by gays), perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that A Few Best Men has a slightly dated look, as if the story were unfolding in another era.

Ah yes, the story. David, a young English guy, has fallen for beautiful Aussie girl Mia (Brent) during a holiday in Tuvalu. But when he returns home to London he is dismayed when his best mates - Tom (Kris Marshall), Luke (Tim Draxl) and Graham (Kevin Bishop) - react coolly to his marriage plans.

Only with difficulty are they persuaded to fly out with him to Australia and be the best men at his wedding. Surely he can't be thinking of actually living in Australia, forsaking all the pleasures of rainy English skies and crowded London tube trains (early glimpses supplied)?

But if you think Dave's mates are a problem, wait till you meet Mia's family. Her dad, Jim Ramme, is a senator, played with teeth-grinding geniality and manic self-importance by the wonderful Jonathan Biggins. Mia's mum, Barbara (Newton-John), is a vacuous social climber who seizes her chance to cut loose from a stultifying world of domestic and political conformity, and there's an oddball sister Daphne (Rebel Wilson), who pretends to be a lesbian. Completing the family circle is the aforementioned sheep, Jim's adored pet and mascot, whose alimentary tract figures prominently in the story. In this company, the supporting cast of gangsters and drug-dealers - to say nothing of Dave's seriously twisted and neurotic best men - seem like regular guys.

This is one Elliott film he hasn't written himself. The screenplay is the work of Dean Craig, who wrote that other British farce Death at a Funeral (and its 2010 Hollywood remake) which might well have been a practice run for A Few Best Men. The basic rule - indeed the rule of all farce - is the same: anything that can wrong will go wrong, whether at a wedding or a funeral.

Elliott orchestrates the chaos with a fine sense of timing, as the proceedings lurch from one catastrophe to another. When a huge ball of "floral decorations" breaks loose from its moorings and careers through the assembled company it's like the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Much of this is funny in a good old-fashioned slapstick way - let's not be sniffy about this - but slapstick is always funniest when characters and story are credible. Would any best man make a speech as obscenely crass as this one? Would any experienced politician, even in the sleaziest world of backroom deals, seriously believe he could gift his senate seat to his daughter as a wedding present? I kept wishing that Biggins - a practised hand at revue-style satire - had contributed some lines to the screenplay.

In Elliott's 2008 comedy Easy Virtue, Jessica Biel played an American girl brought home to meet her prospective husband's English family, who are dismayed to discover she's a celebrity racing driver. The film was based on a Noel Coward play (first made as a silent film by Alfred Hitchcock). Coward (and Hitchcock) were poking fun at the repressed insularity of the British class system. With a little more thought - and more finesse - Elliott might have deconstructed the supposed classlessness of the Australian social scene and mocked some of its empty pretensions. The result might have been as bold and liberating in its way as Priscilla.

A Few Best Men works at odd moments, but everyone tries too hard and the result feels makeshift and disjointed. Dave's character is so colourless and Mia's so sweet that they might be working in different films. I felt a little sorry for everyone, with my deepest sympathy reserved for the sheep.

A Few Best Men (MA15+)
3 stars
National Release