I Love America review – a clunky, corny, cringey mess of a romcom

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

Marceau plays Lisa, a film director (supposedly), who was scarred in childhood by the neglect of a glamorous mother. (Writer-director Lisa Azuelos has apparently based this on her own mother, Marie Laforêt, a singing star who also acted opposite Alain Delon in Plein Soleil). Now a divorcee with grownup kids, Lisa finds that her mum’s death has freed her emotionally to start a new life in a touristically imagined LA in the full Eat-Pray-Love-annoying sense.

It’s here that she tinkers with a “screenplay” (if you please) and hangs out with her regulation-supportive gay best friend Luka (Djanis Bouzyani); he seems to have even less work to do than her. And once Luka has persuaded her to experiment with online dating apps, Lisa shaves a few years off her age, and gets it on with a wonderful younger guy called John (Colin Woodell) who is also a paper-thin creation of nonsense with no backstory or job to do. The nadir is probably the unhilarious “nudist” dating scene in which everyone’s genitals are serendipitously concealed in every shot, like the Austin Powers gag with all the comedy removed. One to miss.

• I Love America is released on 29 April on Amazon Prime.