Man Up (2015)

There is a moment early in Man Up when a hung-over woman in her mid-thirties boards a train to Waterloo and, through a small accident of mistaken identity, tumbles into a stranger's blind date. This is the entire engine of the picture. The film asks nothing larger of itself. It is a boy-meets-girl story told with competent timing, a decent bowling alley, and the dependable mugging of Simon Pegg, and it makes no apology for wanting only to be charming. We have seen this film many times. We will see it many times again. The machinery hums along without incident.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and honest about being thin. Nancy is thirty-four, single, and mildly weary of her friends' arranged introductions, which the screenplay, written by Tess Morris, treats as a mild inconvenience instead of a condition requiring correction. There is a glancing observation about the pressure to pair off, and then the observation is gently set down and forgotten. The cast is uniformly white and English, save for an American lead, and the film has no interest in remarking upon this. Race, class, sexuality, the climate, the economy: none of these intrude upon the proceedings, which is not a failing so much as a design choice. The movie wants to be about two people on a bridge at night, and it is.

The sermon count is negligible. Nobody lectures anyone about the correct way to live, unless we count Jack's tearful confession in a bathroom stall, which is less a moral thesis than a man having a bad week. The humor is observational, the stakes are romantic, and the resolution arrives on schedule. We are left with a pleasant, forgettable confection, competently assembled and entirely untroubled by the questions of its era. It does not ask to be judged against them, and this reviewer, fatigued as ever, will oblige.