Last Chance Harvey

There are so many romantic comedies out there where the actors merely seem to hit their marks, desperately hoping for a decent plot and a few good lines to make things works. It therefore comes as an oddly pleasant surprise when a movie turns up that’s the other way around. There’s very little that's original, clever or which rises above the formulaic about Last Chance Harvey, except for the fact that whoever had the idea to team up Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson again is a genius.

With romantic comedies normally filled with pretty young things who have remarkably little acting talent, it’s great to see one with two actors who really know what they’re doing and who make an astonishingly watchable team. Hoffman and Thompson take what is essentially a pretty pedestrian plot and script, and dance through it gracefully, making the movie far better than it has any right to be.

Hoffman plays Harvey Shine, who’s in London for his daughter’s wedding. However the nuptials just highlight to him how little there is in his life. He’s being pushed aside at work in favour of younger people, he’s divorced, living alone, and his ex-wife’s new husband is closer to his daughter than he is. Not planning to attend the wedding reception, he races back to Heathrow but misses his flight and ends up talking to a woman called Kate (Thompson) in an airport bar. This sets up a fairly run of the mill will-they/won’t they romance between an apparently mismatched couple, with Kate ending up at Harvey’s daughter’s wedding reception and the duo arranging a date that could make or break their romance.

However while every plot development is obvious and signposted, Thompson and Hoffman, despite a 22 year age gap, are absolutely wonderful as the potential couple. They breathe life into characters who really aren’t much more than types, so that by the end you actually care what happens to them. They have a chemistry you don’t see very often these days in films, and you can understand why Hoffman has recently said he considers the work he’s done with Thompson to be some of the most rewarding in his illustrious career.

Sadly there are moments when even these two consummate professionals can’t stop your gag reflex as the movie lurches too far into predictably treacly territory, but they always manage to pull it back from the brink. What the stars seem to realise is that no matter how conventional the film is, there’s something intoxicating about watching two people fall in love, and they play that for all its worth.

Overall Verdict: Hideously predictable, but Hoffman and Thompson save the whole thing from rom-com oblivion.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac