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I Give It a Year. As a cinema lover, I'd give it a miss! Dan Mazer (famous for writing Borat and Bruno, starring Sacha Baron Cohen) gives his directorial debut with this rom com that looks at the trials and tribulations of a newlywed couple during their first year of marriage. Rafe Spall and Rose Byrne play the 'happy' couple and the film also features the likes of Anna Faris, Minnie Driver, Simon Baker and Stephen Merchant.

In a word: terrible. The film is very cruel in the way that the first 5 minutes are actually quite funny with Stephen Merchant giving an incredibly awkward and humorous best man's speech at the wedding of which anyone who has been part of a wedding can relate to and find amusing. You think to yourself that if the movie keeps this tone then you could be in for an hour and a half of laughs.

Instead, what you get is 92 more minutes of very average dialogue that is trying to pass itself off as humour. 95% of the jokes are to do with sex and that is becoming a problem with a lot of films these days like Movie 43 as a prime example. They just aren't clever enough and leave you feeling very disappointed because the scenario of the film can be made into a really funny story with all the things that can go wrong in a marriage. Only a handful of things are portrayed though i.e. leaving the toilet seat up or not taking the bin out when it's full.

As far as rom coms go, it fails miserably at the 'com' part. Stephen Merchant is the only character remotely funny with his typical way of delivering jokes but as for the rest of the cast, it's just appalling! A married couple, played by Minnie Driver and Jason Flemyng, seem to hate each other constantly for no apparent reason and their insults to one another just lack any comedic effect. A disappointing performance as well from Olivia Colman, the newlywed's marriage councillor, who is just a foul mouthed nut case herself with her own marriage problems but, again, the humour isn't there.

Far better rom coms have been made and far better rom coms will be written in the future. Sorry Dan but not the greatest start to a directorial career that I have seen. Maybe stick with Sacha Baron Cohen because even he is funnier than I Give It a Year!

The focus of the new love-story movie "I give it a year" is the ambitious lady advertising executive, Nat (played by Rose Byrne). She can quickly identify threats to her aspirations, and attends parties to network. She has recently married the witty, articulate and embarrassing Josh (played by Rafe Spall), who is a novelist. His exuberant, embarrassing dancing ("...either that or he is being sodomised by the invisible man") and his inappropriate sexual allusions while miming in games of charades, recur throughout this account of their relationship, as Josh's stocks fall lower and lower.

Chloe (charmingly played by Anna Faris) is Josh's other, former love- interest. One of the best performances was by Stephen Merchant who played Danny, the utterly gauche wedding best man, convincingly oblivious to the offence he was causing, as Josh was. The serious-minded Nat, Chloe and Guy (wealthy, educated US American played by Simon Baker) contrast well with Josh and Danny.

The character of the doctor's wife (played by Minnie Driver) was like Beatrice with Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, constantly humorously pragmatic, reinforcing a strong feminist element in the movie.

While Nat and Josh's love affair is painted with nice broad strokes - a kiss in the rain, a New Year party, a photograph in a bookshop with one of Josh's books, a thrown bouquet of flowers and a honeymoon in Venice - , the mundane details of married life - emptying the rubbish bin and putting more loo-roll in the dispenser in the bathroom, for example - seemed clichéed and not well thought out. Similarly the two broken hooks on the bra, which occupy such a central thematic position in the film, risk seeming banal.

I am quite surprised that "I give it a year" was given a 15 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification, considering the explicit sexual suggestion in the scene when Guy, the rich client, discusses the advertising contract with Nat at her company's offices, and considering the explicit images accidentally appearing on the digital photo frame in Nat's parent's lounge.

All comedy stems from tragedy. Comedy cannot exist with a dramatic premise because drama forms the situations of reality from which a narrative can exist and develop. What is said within these situations becomes the punchline. The stronger the situations and the more involving the drama of the story, the funnier the film should be. Modern comedies though often fail to acknowledge the dramatic value of a situation, hoping the jokes will support themselves.

I Give it a Year didn't draw a single laugh from me. It forgoes the crucial rule of humour: comedy must exist in reality. This is an anomaly for the British studio Working Title Films whose films, including Love Actually and Notting Hill, have grounded themselves in both quiet observation and dry wit. With a script by first time director Dan Mazer, the plot and the characters here are both underdeveloped and the jokes misfire from unrealistic situations and dialogue.

Mazer is a long-time collaborator of Sacha Baron Cohen. He wrote and produced all three of Cohen's feature films, including Borat, which were American-UK productions. Similarly, this film is crassly written as though Working Title Films had a broader demographic in mind, to whom the subject of sex might still seem like the high point of comedy.

The concept is not as subversive as Mazer claims it is either. Josh (Rafe Spall) and Nat (Rose Byrne) are a couple who have decided to marry after seven months. None of their friends, including Nat's sister (Minnie Driver), believe that they will last. Two months later and they are already in counselling. Josh has written one book but has failed to grasp the second. Nat is working in an office and frustrated by Josh's complacency and his annoying best friend Danny (Stephen Merchant).

Josh becomes reacquainted with his ex-girlfriend Chloe (Anna Faris) and Nat is attracted to the smooth talking and successful Guy (Simon Baker), an American client who likes her but doesn't know that she is married. The familiar premise of two people already spoken for attaches itself to a gimmick where we are meant to realise that Josh and Nat don't belong to each other and are better suited to other partners.

The film postures as being about the aftermath of commitment, including the consequences of rushing into a marriage. However, this concept is not treated with any dramatic weight or seriousness for the situations to hold any trace of drama or tragedy. Instead, we're reminded frequently of why the couple is unsuited but the point is obvious and laboured: we're meant to laugh at a failing relationship that was never promising to begin with.

Mazer also diminishes the comedy by reducing scenes into disconnected skits, determined to embarrass characters, even the ones that we're meant to be rooting for. The characters are so thinly drawn that it disperses the likelihood of seeing them growing and having an emotional attachment. Being made a slacker, Josh is the target for a lot of juvenile humiliations including: his in-laws seeing naked photos of him! Or dancing drunkenly like Beyoncé at Nat's work function!

The potential partners aren't free from this degradation either. Anna Faris has a terribly unfunny scene where she is squashed under a would- be threesome with her partner and another girl. Simon Baker, whose performance overloads on unctuousness, has his romantic credibility strained in a stupid scene where he brings a violinist and doves to a private board meeting with Nat. Would it spoil the gag to mention there is a fan in the room?

Stephan Merchant is a hugely talented comedian but his role is singular: to be as obnoxious as possible, reminding us how even Josh's friends repulsive to Nat. He echoes Spike from Notting Hill, but minus anything resembling a character arc. He exists to say unlikely things, like a wedding speech where he talks about having sex with bridesmaids. It's unbearably grating and not funny.

Much of the dialogue in I Give it a Year resides in this level of smuttiness to hold the audience's attention in the absence of drama and conflict. But comedy that retains dramatic purpose is always preferable to comedy for comedy's sake. The tragedy that should uphold the dramatic framework of the story must be relative to the characters, not the film itself.

Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall) get married after a whirlwind romance. As their first year of marriage progresses, they begin to learn that they don't seem to be very compatible. When one factors in the reappearance of Josh's previous love interest Chloe (Anna Faris) and Guy (Simon Baker), a romantically inclined client of Nat's, both of whom seem to have much more in common with the spouses, one wonders whether the marriage will survive for a year.

This romcom is, in the modern fashion, fairly rude, so don't go and see it if you are offended by smutty humour, sex, nudity or bad language. It is also, again in the modern fashion, largely powered by the humour of embarrassment (best friend Danny (Stephen Merchant) delivers a Best Man speech of excruciating embarrassment, aware but uncaring of the offence and discomfort he causes, for instance). Again, if you don't care for this sort of humour, you're not going to enjoy the film. And it's clear that a number of reviewers, both professional and other, belong firmly in that camp - nobody likes everything.

But the proof of the pudding lies in the eating. I saw this film in a fairly well attended screening with a mixed audience, mostly mature couples and not the sort of audience I would have expected this film to appeal to, except that they were all people who had experienced the difficulties which the experience of living with someone else brings with it. And that is at the heart of this film. When I wasn't laughing out loud, I was giggling almost constantly - I found this film very funny. And, from the evidence of my ears, I was not alone - there was a lot of (especially female) laughing out loud.

Spall and Faris have some funny stuff, and Byrne is also funny by virtue of playing it straight - of the 4 principals, only Simon Baker suffers from an absence of humorous material. But the secondary characters make up for this, with Merchant's crass best friend and Olivia Coleman's sour relationship counsellor being best of the bunch. There are some very funny set pieces - Baker's attempted hotel seduction, Faris' threesome, Coleman's phone diatribe - and stay through the titles in order to catch Jane Asher's final line.

I really enjoyed this and I recommend it highly (but only if you are in the mood for that sort of thing).

Lately, there has been a curious trend developing in American studio comedies as producers have been trying increasingly to achieve a kind of everyman realism, albeit with photogenic celebrity lead actors and only the most marketable of central social themes. I Don't Know How She Does It ironically made audiences question the plausibility of a forty- something-year-old overworked mother could be as attractive as Sarah Jessica Parker, and manage to find a fifty-something businessman as attractive as Pierce Brosnan to be her love interest, more than it made us marvel at the way she copes with a hectic home and work life. This is 40 hardly has anything on display about the realities of middle age that is not already well known.

A film titled I Give it a Year would seemingly be another flick from this same production line about the third world problems experienced by a mostly happily married couple, but its trailer showed it to be a brilliant British ensemble comedy with a hilarious host of supporting characters who are prime participants and comical spectators of the disintegrating marriage between languid husband Josh (Rafe Spall) and plucky but uptight wife Nat (Rose Byrne). It was a premise that also carried a promising cynical appeal with its anti-rom-com focus on a gradual breakup rather than a hook-up.

So does it deliver, or are all the best lines and novel ideas used up by the trailer? Well, it doesn't exactly break the mould of the tired genre. It's true that our two non-compatible romantic leads are bitterly falling out of love with each another, but this is largely because they are falling in love with their respective American-born acquaintances: suave, handsome travelling businessman Guy (Simon Baker) and Josh's sweet ex-girlfriend Chloe (Anna Faris). To this double-date romantic crossover comedy, the two Americans seem to have brought a packed suitcase full of sappy, coy, fairy-tale clichés, but thankfully most of these are offset or spiced up by the inspired, zany, zappy British humour of writer/director Dan Mazer (Borat, Brüno) who conversely has his vulgar extremities healthily moderated by the sterile Hollywood influences.

However, the trademark humour of Sacha Baron Cohen and his other collaborators does come through on several deliciously memorable occasions in pleasingly small doses. Mazer particularly enjoys writing cringe-inducing dialogue for Stephen Merchant, a comedian naturally inclined to unwittingly say wildly inappropriate things at the most unfortunate of times. Merchant delivers every one of his golden, ingeniously awkward lines with terrific repulsive charm. It's true that a lot of these are in the trailer, which gives the misleading impression that Merchant's character of Josh's most insufferable friend, features much more than he actually does, but given more time on screen he may well have become as tiresome as Cohen's obnoxiously repugnant character creations.

Still, every character has at least one gorgeously revolting comedic moment or two to shine, even our contractually generic romantic interests, and while some may complain about the portion sizes of the Merchant magic, we certainly get our fill the other good supporting characters. Minnie Driver and Jason Flemyng are very entertaining as a couple who are bizarrely content with their discontentment with each other. Driver infuses the familiar snide unromantic witticisms she's given with a great, fresh energy, and Flemyng bring his usual charm to the role of the apathetic, good-for-nothing husband. Olivia Colman relishes her role as a cantankerous marriage counsellor who doesn't exactly lead a good example in her own marriage.

However, veteran actors Jane Asher and Nigel Planer are barely given much to relish as Nat's parents, who spend most of the time giving fairly standard and uninteresting reactions to the much more exciting and inventive comedic happenings on the opposite end of the frame. Some audience members will likely be disappointed by this, we can't always watch our favourite actors in the juiciest roles.

We should be grateful that Mazer has mixed together the crude humour of unwatchable shock-fest comedies with the nauseating sentimentality of unwatchable factory-made chick flicks to make something that is very watchable, and enjoyable, even if it has a strange love/hate relationship with the latter type of film. While not quite anti-rom-com, I applaud it for keeping both the jokes and the romance running alongside each other, rather suddenly abandoning all humour at the halfway mark and forcing an indigestible dramatic tone on its farcical narrative. This is actually a true romantic comedy, a fact that smacks of the same irony that much of the dialogue does. It's definitely one of the better pieces of light entertainment out there, even if it's no comedic masterpiece.

Although earnest, the story is flimsy and lacks heart - which ends up wasting a great cast. I love Rose Byrne in comedy roles, which I think can eventually lead her to greatness. Plus the talents of Anna Faris and Minnie Driver - a missed opportunity.

I get the comedy potential of a married couple, each falling in love with someone else. But it's wasted here, as the story rushed along too fast, never letting us fall in love with the characters.

Stephen Merchant nearly stole the show, sounding exactly like a Ricky Gervais stand-up routine. Yes, I know they're writing partners. Maybe the film should have been about him.

One of the press releases proclaimed I Give it a Year as the best British film of the year. Fortunately, the year is still very young. And last year they saved the best, Sightseers, for last. Fear not, there is still much cause for hope.

The title and the trailer tell you everything you need to know, so no synopsis here. It begins strongly with a 'watch through your fingers' best man's speech from Danny (Stephen Merchant), which, though he cannot hope to match that speech from Four Weddings and a Funeral, prompts as many chuckles as he does groans. He doesn't merely dig himself a hole of humiliation, he keeps on digging until he disappears from sight, unaware that everyone else is either squirming or preparing to kill.

The wedding scenes establish I Give it a Year perfectly, providing plenty of evidence of how woefully mismatched couple, Josh (Rafe Spall) and Nat (Rose Byrne) are and the relationships between couple and in-laws, while providing plenty of opportunity for background humour. Watch for the destruction caused by the horribly twee and ecologically disastrous tradition of Chinese lanterns.

And then it thuds.

I Give it a Year desperately wants to be an original rom-com but it hasn't the balls to see it through.

*********** MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER ALERT *********** Writer Dan Mazer hit an Oscar-nominated high with his screenplay for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan but fails to come even close to that constant barrage of gags and clever dialogue. And not even the director can save him because, oh, it's Dan Mazer. He presents a couple whose biggest crime is not being stereotypical but being unpleasant at heart. They both fall for other people (Josh for Chloe, his ex-girlfriend; Nat for Guy, a new client) who are genuine and more interested in other people and helping make the world a better place than in wearing designer labels or climbing the career ladder.

While at first Josh appears devoted to Nat, we discover he's critical, lazy and controlling. And Nat, though apparently a sweet Venus, is actually self-centred, demanding and lacking in understanding. Meanwhile, Chloe (Anna Faris) and Guy (Simon Baker) are presented to us as perfect. When they are thrust together by default it is a moment to exhale a satisfied sigh and expect an evolving script that bravely gives the unpleasant leads their comeuppance and allows the underdogs true love and happiness.

But that initial hint at Mazer's ability to give us something new with I Give it a Year is short lived and he fails monumentally by having the wrong couples get together when they are clearly not suitable for each other. What is he playing at? It isn't sweet, it isn't romantic, it isn't a tail of love, it's a balls-up of a genuinely good idea. It rarely climbs above 'vaguely amusing' and frequently falls below 'ho-hum.' Moreover, when we hit the final scene where true love supposedly finds its way, it's just an amateurish mess that leaves us annoyed.

That said, the presence of Minnie Driver as Nat's a sour-faced friend almost makes the 97-minute running time worthwhile. Her glares may be withering but the way she scythes her husband (Jason Flemying) is delightful and Mazer has the good sense not to over-do her appearances.

The funniest lines are delivered by the underused Nigel Planer (curiously uncredited on IMDb) as Josh's dad and Jane Asher as the mother-in-law from hell (you'll need to watch the credits for her humdinger) but the thief of the film is Olivia Colman. Again. While her first scene as the marriage guidance counsellor edges towards pantomime, her later scene where she lets rip at her husband over the phone is comedy magic and the standout moment of I Give it a Year.

Alas, it's not enough to make the admission price worthwhile.

I Give it a Year is neither the worst nor the funniest film of 2013. The year is in its infancy and we'll see more at either end of the scale in the coming 11 months. It is little more than another wasted idea with a few very funny moments that won't justify your time or the production budget.

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