Jim (Brendan Cowell) and his best friend Blake (Peter Helliar) are in their early thirties and still enjoy hitting the clubs together. Jim is far more successful in meeting women than Blake is but his encounters rarely last more than a single night. When he meets Alice (Yvonne Strahovski) in a club they both happily expect to be together for just for an evening but their relationship continues for another three and a half years. Jim works in the largest miniature railway station in Australia, while Alice is contemplating an important job offer back in the UK. She is frustrated in seeing other people strengthening their romantic entanglements, while Jim has still not proposed to her. When Jim embarrasses Alice over dinner and cannot bring himself to say that he loves her, she decides she will leave him and take the job offer. Distressed, Jim hits the bottle and the clubs once more and ends up sleeping in someone else's car. The vehicle belongs to Charlie (Peter Dinklage), who is initially going to call the police, but he decides he will try and advise Jim on how to make it up to his girlfriend.
For almost a decade now Australian cinema has seen both the very best and worst comedies that an industry could offer. The fluctuations in quality can largely be attributed to the types of the scripts that are produced. There are some like Kenny (2006) that are perfectly tuned to Australia's unique brand of humour and present colourful but wholly relatable characters too. Then there are those like The Extra (2005), so painfully devoid of laughs, that they tarnish Australian films collectively as being lacklustre. I Love You Too, directed by Daina Reid and written by co-star Peter Helliar, falls somewhere in the middle of the Australian comedy spectrum. It is a frequently crude and improbable film but it at least knows where its heart lies. Its predictable narrative offers familiar and transparent themes of mateship and the importance of responsibility, with sporadic laughs along the way. The film's main setup in having to win Alice back is problematic because it is difficult to accept that someone so beautiful would be willing to tolerate a buffoon like Jim. Jim's dialogue in the restaurant scene is so obnoxious and unsubtle that it strain's the audience credibility in believing that this relationship could have existed for so long. Helliar's crude brand of humour works wonderfully in small doses on TV shows that offer similarly crazy tones, but here it is cringing rather than witty. A scene where he decides to introduce Jim to a fifty-year-old hooker because he thinks she looks like Alice is indicative of the lowbrow humour that he has become accustomed to.
Rather ironically, what buoys the film is also its small ingredient. The casting of Peter Dinklage, a dwarf actor who was so convincing in Death at a Funeral (2007), is an inspired choice. Helliar has admitted writing the part specifically with Dinklage's voice in mind and as such the role fits accordingly. Dinklage is not only funny but he grounds his performance where the other actors cannot. He offers a sense of class and astuteness to his character and his final moments on screen are surprisingly poignant. Given how obnoxious and lowbrow his character is, Helliar thankfully only has a minor role to play himself as the boofhead friend. To his credit, he does have one single great line where he concedes that some men like Jim have an aura that lets them have any girl they want, whereas someone like him can only hope that a woman will look past all his flaws. Cowell is an unlikely romantic lead and even by the end of the picture he still does not have the level of sincerity to convince us that he belongs with Alice. His chemistry is best shared with Charlie and together their scenes bring some laughs. Megan Gale has a solid debut, playing an Italian model and she is a gorgeous inclusion.
I Love You Too is a familiar and lightweight romantic comedy with occasional laughs and a sugary, predictable conclusion. The material here, particularly the characterisation, is largely insubstantial and too often does the film aim for cheap laughs rather than anything particularly smart or witty. It is at least rescued by the professionalism and charisma of Dinklage, who makes this at best a standard Australian comedy of good but unremarkable intentions.
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