I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The first must-see film of the year.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Matthew Barnes (Mike Binder) and his wife (Janeane Garofalo) have just arrived in London, where he is to finalize an important merger for his company, but from the moment they step off the plane, everything goes wrong. John Gissing (Alan Rickman), his company contact, was supposed to arrange a driver, a suite, and a bank account, but none of it has materialized and Gissing himself is missing. The only one who wants to help is a very pretty and unusual nun.The first half of this movie is laugh-out-loud funny with madcap misadventures and a bit of a mystery as well. Writer/director/star Binder is quite likable as the Everyman/Underdog hero, but he looks and acts so much like Ben Stiller than I kept wishing they'd just hired Stiller instead. Garofalo is her usual wise-cracking persona and is very funny. Alan Rickman isn't on-screen nearly enough, but his scenes are the best.The second half bogs down into an endless discussion of Matthew's Merger/Acquisition/Big Deal and I found it confusing and tedious. This is supposed to be an office farce about jealousy and climbing the corporate ladder at all costs, but the last hour was dull and relied too much on silly slapstick humor.Recommended if you're an Alan Rickman fan or have nothing better to watch.

If you love bathroom humour you may like this film.There are a few oddball jokes but this comedy about a business takeover is boring. The interaction between the husband-wife team becomes increasingly tedious. As the movie moves along, scenes, which are suppose to be funny, become more and more improbable. There is actually one scene of a man urinating on the boss's favorite chair – if this sounds hilarious then maybe this is the movie for you! Another perplexing sequence is when a nun plays a sad song on a guitar and starts to partially reveal her breasts. After this she takes a more revealing shower. None of this came off as remotely funny. Somehow the scenes in this movie just do not work together at all. It's like National Lampoon goes to London.

I sought this out first and foremost for Alan Rickman, and I wasn't disappointed. He gets so few opportunities to play comedy and that's really a crime. At one point I literally spit across the room from laughing so hard (fortunately wasn't eating at the time). Janeane is her standard delightfully sarcastic self, though tragically underused. This seems to be all about Mike Binder playing Woody Allen (I'm really not that into either actor). Some scenes are obviously only a setup to one key line for him to say. The jump cuts mentioned earlier I thought at first were an artistic attempt, but eventually get very, very annoying. The DVD has an impressive amount of extras for being privately released, no complaints there. The supporting actors were all very good, but really the only reason to see this is for Mr. Rickman's performance. This has easily shot to the top three in my collection of his films.

In this film, Mike Binder (who also directed) is an American businessman named Matthew Barnes who just arrived in London with his wife (played by Janeane Garofalo), where Matthew is supposed to take over the final negotiations for a big merger with a German firm. Unfortunately, all of the arrangements were made by John Gissing (Alan Rickman), who feels passed over for the job and sabotages Matthew at every turn. Another key character is their boss, Francois (played by Allan Corduner, who played Sullivan in "Topsy-Turvy").All of the characters are interesting, as is the direction and editing (which features lots of jump cuts). All in all I was pleasantly surprised given the poor review I had read in the local newspaper. Seen at Cinequest (the San Jose, CA film festival), where it was the opening night film on 2/21/2002.