Jack and I loved this romantic comedy, set in an alternate reality where the Beatles are erased from almost everyone's memory, where one struggling musician passes off the Lennon/McCartney masterpieces as his own compositions.
Himesh Patel (in his feature debut after 566 episodes of EastEnders, which I've never seen, and a handful of other TV and shorts) is wonderful as the befuddled and earnest musician Jack. One reviewer commented that the filmmakers did not have to cast a "brown" person (Patel is British-born of East Indian descent) but simply hired the best man for the job. Lily James (last blogged for Darkest Hour) is lovely as his lifelong platonic friend who yearns for more, and Kate McKinnon (most recently in these pages for The Spy Who Dumped Me) reliably hilarious as the cutthroat agent propelling Jack to fame. Musician Ed Sheeran plays a version of himself, in a role originally intended for Coldplay's Chris Martin. There's a Coldplay gag in the trailer and in the movie, which they left in even after Martin dropped out.
Director Danny Boyle (last blogged for T2 Trainspotting) and screenwriter Richard Curtis (most recently in these pages for About Time) work from a story by Curtis and Jack Barth (feature debut).
The production reportedly paid $10 million to option twenty Beatles songs and used seventeen of them, almost exclusively played by Patel in the movie. The soundtrack is available for streaming on Spotify and Apple Music, among other platforms. There are some very short "interludes" by Daniel Pemberton (composed for Ocean's Eight), which you're unlikely to remember.
I don't know what the Rotten Tomatoes critics were expecting, since their average is a scant 63%. We're much more in line with its audiences at 89.
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