Adam is getting married to Sarah. During the ceremony, however, his best friend, Bav, makes one gaffe after another. But that’s just the beginning. The couple is about to leave on their honeymoon for Venice. Everything seems to be prepared to perfection. But there’s still Bav who foils their plans; in fact, he needs attention at the wrong time and leaves with them. Adam and Sarah’s honeymoon thus turns into a nightmare.
Bav is always with them, he also needs the bathroom in their hotel room and never wants to be separated from them. In addition, he meets Lucas, an Italian gangster who falls in love with Sarah. After Bav causes yet another disaster during a party in the boss’s mansion by breaking priceless objects, the newly weds are forced to part ways. To compensate Lucas, Adam and Bav must in fact leave Venice for Slovenia to deliver a shipment of drugs.
He, she and the other. Perhaps the only successful misunderstanding in The Honeymoon is the beginning when it appears that the person being married is Bav instead of Adam. The bond between the two protagonists is very strong.
You can tell from the opening credits when the photos, from when they were children, underline a long-standing friendship. This morbid relationship could have been a turning point but Dean Craig’s film – already specialized in matrimonial comedies after A Love and a Thousand Weddings – prefers to take a different route wrapping itself in an image of classic Venice, even if he wants to transform it into a thriller city, and in the construction of secondary characters, such as the two henchmen of Lucas.
The Honeymoon has a writing problem and is quite surprising for a writer like Craig who has often managed to combine comedy with a macabre breath as in Frank Oz’s Funeral Party and Neil LaBute’s Funeral is Served, or create a wild pace as in Three Men and a Sheep. The 2011 film directed by Stephan Elliott seems to be the model for The Honeymoon, above all for the way in which catastrophic situations risk ruining the wedding.
But this time the characters are weaker and the cumbersome presence of Bav (played by Asim Chaudry, famous above all for the People Just Do Nothing series) is initially amusing (the scene in which he embraces his friend in Venice forcing Sarah to remove her hand ) but then decidedly repetitive. Even when the film veers towards the detective story, it lacks the necessary tension (as in the course of the search at the checkpoint).