While Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) is getting ready for his dad’s funeral that will take place at home, he thinks his biggest concerns are preparing a good eulogy and remembering to put down a deposit for the flat he and his wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) will be moving to. However from the very beginning, everything that can go wrong (and things that you thought would never happen do) go wrong:
His cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan) is driving with her fiancé and is supposed to pick up her brother Troy (Kris Marshall) who is studying to be a pharmacist and is experimenting with drugs. When she wants to calm her extremely nervous fiancé (Alan Tudyk) down, she gives him a Valium. Only, it is not a Valium- it is a mixture of drugs, including acid- designed to keep you high, very high.
Daniel’s mates Howard (Andrew Nyman) and Justin (Ewen Bremner) are supposed to pick Daniel’s Uncle Alfie up- a very grumpy old man in a wheelchair and all the dirty work falls upon Howard since Justin is really only coming to the funeral so that he can hit on Martha.
There is a very short man in the funeral called Peter (Peter Dinklage) who claims to be his father’s friend but no one has met him before. And he insists that he needs to talk to Daniel.
And everyone seems to be disappointed that the eulogy won’t be coming from Robert (Rupert Graves), Daniel’s accomplished novelist of a brother who is not exactly the most responsible kind…
From then on, it is about trying to control a drugged fiancé, an angry father, a friend who is more concerned about his skin than the funeral, a supposed friend only concerned about shagging Martha, a man with a very humiliating secret, lost drugs posing as valium and….yeah, there is more.
While you have seen families with issues before, you probably haven’t seen families dealing with all these issues, at the same time, during a funeral. Events are so funny that there is really no need for one liners. Some stuff will make you grin and some might really make you laugh out loud. Sure, you might not enjoy one thing or two. I thought the whole toilet incident was disgusting. But overall, this is a funny comedy. And the hilarity increases when Peter explains what he is there for and family members try to prevent him from exposing.
It is fun to see Matthew Macfadyen in such a film after seeing Pride and Prejudice. Who could have thought a funeral could have been so hilarious?
Written by Dean Craig and directed by Frank Oz. 7.3. Agreed.
[pro-player width=’530′ height=’253′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWH8W1IfFv4[/pro-player]
