Cinema - The Last Kiss

When a European film is made the subject of a remake for an Anglo/American audience soon after the release of the original, it raises the hope that more will have been gained in translation than simply the loss of sub-titles. But Paul Haggis's (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) remake of the 2002 Italian film L'Ultimo Baccio seems to be distinctive only by its being less successful.

The Last Kiss is not so much a coming-of-age tale as a story about not wanting to grow up, set against an exploration of the trappings of monogamy and the appeal of infidelity. Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State) returns to the big screen in the role of Michael, a young man on the verge of hitting thirty, who is thrown into a quarter-life crisis at the news that his long-term girlfriend is pregnant. The arrival of an unattached young college student (the OC's Rachel Bilson), serves to remind him of all that he might be giving up by fathering a child and getting a mortgage. Inevitably, his life course becomes polarised between the two women and their corresponding degrees of maturity and commitment. He's not the only one either. The film is scattered with cross-generational sub-plots in which characters are either avoiding commitments or chasing lost romances. Whilst the high-speed Italian version was praised for capturing the human frailties with humour and candour, Haggis's offering seems to have lost audience sympathy by over-indulgencing the unappealing character's existential woes. ER