Forgetting Sarah Marshall (15) Director Nicholas Stoller Starring Jason Segal, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand 112 mins Three star rating Starting with Knocked Up this is the fifth House of Apatow production to be released in a year and it adhe

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (15)

Director Nicholas Stoller Starring Jason Segal, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand

112 mins

Three star rating

Starting with Knocked Up this is the fifth House of Apatow production to be released in a year and it adheres to the default crude yet romantic comedy house model - a nerdy man getting off with a sexy career lady.

Here the man is struggling musician Peter (Jason Segal) who has his heart broken by Sarah Marshall (Kirsten Bell). He flies off to Hawaii to forget her only to find she's staying there in the same hotel with her rock star boyfriend (Russell Brand).

So while the supporting cast is packed out with Apatow's tried and tested (Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Bill Hader), the leads are the latest from the long list of talented male comic performers and attractive females from established US TV series that Apatow feels a need to pair in his movies.

Segal wrote the script and he can make you laugh but he can't make you care about his character. This is a major failing considering he's playing a man who has just lost the love of his life to Russell Brand - an indignity so horrific it would normally have grown men hyperventilating with sympathy and concern.

Brand gets to play himself, to the extent that he wears his own clothes and keeps the silly hair and the little beard that looks like it's been drawn on with a biro. He's very funny but he's a performer who people tend not to cut a lot of slack - and that's how this film struck me. Watching it I felt like a cruel and tyrannical monarch with a court jester - content while he was making me laugh, but the moment the laughing stopped, it was off with his head.

I should mention that this is without doubt the cheapest-looking motion picture I've seen for a long time. I know nothing about the dark arts of editing, but some of the cutting in this looked amateurish to me.

Half the time, far from being in Hawaii, it looked like the scenes were filmed in a studio with actors standing in front of a screen with some sea back-projected onto it.