Movie reviews: Cake, Project Almanac, The Wedding Ringer

Jennifer Aniston has made a career from playing light-hearted, sweet-natured characters, but her latest offering, Cake (15A), is anything but the comic confection we’ve come to expect.

Kicked out of her support group for sufferers of chronic pain due to her inability to manage her anger, Claire (Aniston) develops an unhealthy obsession with a former group member, Nina (Anna Kendrick), who recently committed suicide.

Insinuating her way into the life of Nina’s bereaved husband Roy (Sam Worthington), Claire embarks on a perilous journey to the heart of her own all-consuming grief. Directed by Daniel Barnz, from a screenplay by Patrick Tobin, Cake is a wholly engrossing meditation on how to go on living when you have no faith in, or love of, life itself.

Bleak in tone, it is frequently enlivened by Claire’s pitch-black sense of humour, although Aniston’s expert comic timing is the least of her contribution here.

Moving excruciatingly slowly (as a result of injuries sustained in a traffic accident) and popping painkillers by the handful, the visibly scarred Claire is a woman who is functioning rather than living, and Aniston gives a wonderfully tender and empathic reading of a character who has been scraped bare and hollowed out.

A vibrant Kendrick provides a strong counterpoint to Claire’s existential crisis in her cameos as a hallucination/ghost, and Worthington is subtly impressive as a man struggling to cope with his own unbearable burden, but the movie belongs to Aniston and she responds by delivering a career-best performance.

Desperate to come up with an idea that will win him a scholarship to MIT, teenage inventor David (Jonny Weston) stumbles upon Project Almanac (12A) in his basement, the blueprints for an ‘energy research’ concept his father was working on before he was killed in a car accident ten years previously.

Put simply, the project is a rudimentary time machine: With the help of his friends Quinn (Sam Lerner) and Adam (Allen Evangelista) and his sister Christina (Virginia Gardner), David sets about constructing what he hopes will be his passport to MIT.

Once the friends start experimenting with the machine, however, things very quickly start to go wrong.

Director Dean Israelite’s debut feature is very much a love letter to the time-travel sub-genre of sci-fi — it references a host of films, from Looper to Terminator and even Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — and has a lot of sly fun doing so: The friends incorporate smart-phones and X-Box players into their time machine, and some of the time-travel plot twists that occur reference plot glitches from similar films.

Deliciously old-fashioned on the one hand — the laboratory in the basement could have been lifted from a Hammer Horror movie — it’s also a very smart and contemporary teen movie, particularly in terms of the hand-held camera narrative and the withering banter between the friends.

It’s an ensemble piece, but Weston shines in the lead role as a charming science geek who is more than happy to screw around with the space-time continuum if it means a beautiful girl will fall in love with him. And really, what 17-year-old science geek wouldn’t?

Huge in America, fast-talking comedian Kevin Hart has yet to have a big hit on this side of the pond, but he offers his most likeable turn yet in The Wedding Ringer (15A).

Finding himself without a best man for his upcoming wedding, hapless groom-to-be Doug (Josh Gad) turns to Jimmy (Hart), a professional best man who will, for a sizeable fee, pretend to be the perfect best friend for your big day.

Sound in theory, but the course of deceiving your bride-to-be never runs smooth, etc, especially when you opt for the ‘Golden Tux’ package, which requires a whole posse of groomsmen too.

The set-up sounds suspiciously similar to the 2009 Paul Rudd /Jason Segel ‘bromance’ I Love You, Man, but Hart’s rapid-fire delivery and irrepressible energy has a charm of its own, largely because he seems to be channelling his inner Eddie Murphy.

It helps, too, that there’s a good chemistry between Hart and his co-star Gad, who hams it up so delightfully as a nebbish poltroon that you do begin to wonder how he managed to woo the beautiful Gretchen (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) in the first place.

Writer-director Jeremy Garelick shoe-horns in plenty of gross-out comedy and slapstick humour, and while it’s all very slight, it’s also frequently funny, particularly when Jimmy cuts loose with yet another rant about Doug’s myriad deficiencies.