Love Actually is actually a terrible movie
It just gets worse, and worse, and worse with every passing year.
Love Actually is a terrible movie.
Why do I write this heresy? Let’see…
The dad appears to get over his dead wife over the course of the holidays, no 8-year-old knows what love is, Laura Linney's character might as well not be in the movie at all (such a waste of talent), Alan Rickman is a predator with a weird secondary obsession with Laura Linney, the Prime Minister’s staff keep calling a woman junior staffer fat and this is supposed to be funny (irrelevant, but she is in no way actually anywhere close to fat).
The Walking Dead guy is a straight-up stalker, Keira Knightley was 17 when she was cast as the wife of Chiwetel Ejiofor (who was 26 at the time), Emma Thompson, who is somehow related to the dad and the Prime Minister, makes a terrible life choice and that’s just OK because at least she has…Joni Mitchell. And no one would ever elect Hugh Grant.
But if they did it’s totally OK that he sends his (supposedly fat) assistant off to some random job far, far away because he’s attracted to her - only to, a few days later, go door-to-door down a street in a random neighborhood - as the Prime Minister remember - demanding to know where she is because he wants to ask her out.
Oh and all of these people just happen to live so close to one another that all of their kids go to the same school, even though the dad and kid definitely do not live in "the dodgy end".
Meanwhile, Colin Firth falls in love with a woman he can’t speak to who lives in an enchanted village where everyone speaks Portuguese…in France. A village in which the dad tries to sell Colin Firth his “ugly daughter”.
So as you settle in to enjoy this dumpster fire of a movie, don’t think too hard about the “plot”. Even if love is all around. Bah humbug.