Notting Hill (1999)

“Notting Hill” is a sugary and unbelievably cheesy rom-com that I expected to hate, but it wasn’t as awful as I expected. Don’t get me wrong “Notting Hill” isn’t earth-shattering, but overall, it’s a totally acceptable and competent film with one-note characters and some decent gags.

The cast in “Notting Hill” all do a fairly good job in their roles. I’m pretty sure Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts play themselves for the majority of the movie, they had ok chemistry but I didn’t really believe that their characters relationship was anything other than a Hollywood fantasy.

Rhys Ifans is probably the most memorable part of “Notting Hill” as the gross yet kind-hearted comic relief, Hugh Bonneville plays a near-identical version of Mr Brown from the “Paddington” movies and the late Emma Chambers does an excellent job of playing a more uncensored version of her character from “The Vicar of Dibley.”

I’m a big fan of writer Richard Curtis’s work for TV (“Mr Bean” and “The Vicar of Dibley” are two of my favourite TV shows of all time), but I sadly can’t say the same for any of his rom-coms. “Notting Hill” suffers from a lot of the same issues that plagued the downright bad “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, the characters don’t feel like real people and the story is cheesy and formulaic; you can pretty much predict every beat in the plot within the opening few scenes. Despite my obvious dislike of this trope-ridden genre, I would be very interested in seeing a Richard Curtis-written rom-com spoof. His films always excel in the comedy department and a film such as “Notting Hill” follows the romance movie template so rigidly that it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to transform it into an all-out parody.

In conclusion, “Notting Hill” is very average. Whilst it did feature some genuinely amusing moments (the interview montage was both humorous and extremely cringe-worthy), the story is so generic and full of clichés that I can’t really recommend this movie to anyone who isn’t a die-hard rom-com fan, and any rom-com fan has probably seen dozens of other movies that are identical to this one anyway.