Every genre has a formula, though few have conventions so easily mishandled as the romantic comedy. Last Chance Harvey tells the story of Harvey (Dustin Hoffman), an American musician who loses his job and has a generic family-centreed conflict while overseas in London. While there, he meets Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), an airline hospitality surveyor whose mother calls her every 10 minutes to neurotically harp that her new Polish neighbour is secretly barbecuing bodies in the smokeshack in his yard. If you haven't already guessed the general trajectory of the plot, then you will have before the film's exposition is complete (hint: love conquers all).
Of course, for those with a proclivity toward the romcom, the all-too-visible machinations of writer-director Joel Hopkins’s script probably won't be much of a deterrent, and there’s plenty here to focus on besides plot. Both Hoffman and Thompson coast through Hopkins’s sentimental tripe with the ease of professional acrobats doing a handstand, and some scenes — particularly those at the film’s climax — are so embarrassingly far below the veteran actors’ abilities that they actually seem to be making up their characters as they go. As the film presses on, Hoffman in particular piles on so many trademark flits of the eye and ticks of the tongue that his performance begins to verge on self-parody. If Harvey is worthwhile at all, it’s for Hoffman and Thompson’s charming demolition of the paper-thin material.
While Hopkins fights for his tear-jerking moments like a mother grizzly bear protecting her cubs, any poignancy they might have had is undercut by the prevailing sense that he’s a writer too enamoured with formula and too insecure to play with it. That said, Last Chance Harvey is a bland movie about bland characters doing bland things, barely propped up by the charisma of its leads in the same way that, say, Live Free or Die Hard is a dumb movie about dumb characters doing dumb things, barely propped up by its bombastic action set pieces. Both are examples of clunky genre filmmaking, and it’s really only specific taste that separates their respective viewerships. Either way, they’re guilty pleasures.
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