Anyone making a comedy about either an English wedding or a funeral inevitably invites comparisons with Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of the most successful British films of recent years.
Unfortunately, Frank Oz's movie, which is about a funeral, simply doesn't cut it, largely thanks to a screenplay that gets more desperate for laughs as it progresses and ends up like an out-of-kilter Whitehall farce.
Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) is arranging the last rites of his beloved father. The film opens with the funeral firm bringing in the wrong coffin.
Soon he is beset by his famous novelist brother (Rupert Graves) who refuses to pay his share of the bill for the expensive proceedings, a wife (Keely Hawes) who worries about him not putting the down payment on a flat they want and a cousin (Daisy Donovan) whose generally reliable new boyfriend (Alan Tudyk) has mistakenly taken a hallucinatory drug instead of a Valium.
And that is by no means all. A height-challenged guest (Peter Dinklage) arrives intent on blackmail since he has just had a homosexual relationship with dad and has the photographs to prove it. Mother (Jane Asher) must on no account be told and the stranger wants £15,000 to keep quiet.
All the acting is enthusiastic and as well-observed as the script allows. But whereas the best feature in Four Weddings was its clever detailing of middle-class manners and a performance from Hugh Grant that made him into a star, Death at a Funeral seems to think it is funny to have bodies falling out of coffins and chairbound uncles needing the lavatory.
In the end the knockabout humour totally destroys the glimmers of spiteful sophistication which would have made it much funnier.
Death At A Funeral
Cert: 15
