I liked Susanne Bier's earlier films, but her later work has become more conventional, and not in a good way. There are standard elements to many mainstream romantic comedies, and sadly, her film 'Love Is All You Need' uses several off-the shelf-elements: the Darcy-esque male (played by Pierce Brosnan, looking startlingly like Ronald Regan), superficially arrogant and possessed of enough money to allow a fantasy setting; the heroic characters' unworthy rivals for love, the ghastly relative painted utterly without sympathy. It says a lot that the key moment in this film is of the Darcy character, who has everything, telling his dreadful sister in law how awful she is; the film seems less interested in what makes people "bad" than in the nuisance they cause for everybody else. Although there are some original components to the story, principally its trilingual Italian-Danish-English structure, this mainly feels like a device to add a little bit of glamour, rather than any depth.
Review of Love Is All You Need
