Speed Dating
DIR/WRI: Tony Herbert • PRO: John Conroy, Tony Herbert • DOP: John Conroy • ED: Kate Walshe • DES: Nicola Moroney • CAST: Hugh O'Conor, Don Wycherley, Emma Choy, Flora Montgomery

Basing an entire movie around the three-minute art of speed dating is certainly a novel idea. It’s a concept lacking in depth, however, and the title quickly becomes a misnomer, since the speed dating is merely a comic aside. Never really becoming the full story, it is content to wade in now and again with the odd giggle.

The intro leads you to believe that this is a simple comedy of errors – wrong decisions and wrong women. Our ‘hero’, James, is a malfunctioning heir to wealth whose heart has been badly broken. He turns to the world of speed dating as an easy fix, and his ‘box’ never being ticked at the end of the night exposes his romantic inadequacies. His meekness is jerked out of complacency into a world of murder, mayhem and amnesia when he loses his memory ‘researching’ a woman. On awaking from his stupor, he discovers her missing, and him the chief suspect. The result of this thematic overreaching makes Speed Dating more of a made-for-TV, soap-esque melodrama than the blackly comedic tour de force it aspires to be.

James’s amnesia occurs early on in the movie, and he forgets his old life of indecision, heartbreak, guilty wealth and lack of confidence. He thus creates a clean slate on which to build a new, more coherent, existence. Forgetting the murders, stalking, and drugs, this idea is the core of an otherwise messy movie. Watching the vulnerable performance of Hugh O’Conor as James appeals to the fractured child in all of us, and his journey to self-awareness is the heart around which everything else gravitates.

James’s familial disarray – the landed gentry problems of drink and over-indulgence – is played for laughs, and jars slightly on a reality check. His own inclusion in this circle seems an afterthought, as does his appearance in the local pub with two obvious idiots as friends. The relationships of the movie are not given any real time or effort, leaving them poorly defined and unrealistic. Don Wycherley and Luke Griffin’s over-the-top ‘cops’ merely add to the confusion as they curse and pummel their way into scenes with American fervour. More than the rest, his relationship with Susan King, a nurse who tends to his amnesia, is the hardest to swallow. Her interest in him is at odds with the insanity of a woman getting involved with a suspected stalker and murderer, and comes across as theatrical and unsound.

The filmmakers used differing accents and unrecognisable locations to create a universal appeal, but it makes the movie seem disjointed and without centre. Perhaps rooting it in a named city might have given it the focus it lacks, but as it stands, the world accents and untitled areas give it a rambling quality more akin to stage performance than celluloid.

Too many distractions spiral out of control in this well-thought out, but poorly executed, movie. Ill-defined moronic friends, family oddities, hard-to-place accents, and a patently ridiculous love story detract from the interesting possibilities of a young man’s journey into self. Without these distractions, it might have been a blackly comic showcase of James’s withdrawal from a world he doesn’t like. With them, Speed Dating is a moderately entertaining film in the vein of When Brendan met Trudy. That is to say, it doesn’t quite tick the right boxes.

Sarah Griffin

Rated 15A (see IFCO website for details)
Speed Dating is released on 20th April 2007.
Speed Dating – Official website