Lessons in Love [Some Kind of Beautiful] ** (2014, Pierce Brosnan, Salma Hayek, Jessica Alba, Malcolm McDowell) – Movie Review

Pierce Brosnan plays a Cambridge poetry professor who begins to re-evaluate his lusty life of roving-eye sexual excess after meeting American sisters Salma Hayek and Jessica Alba in London.

Director Tom Vaughan’s romcom, written by Matthew Newman, has had bad word of mouth and bad press, and changed its title a couple of times. (The original title was How to Make Love Like an Englishman, then Some Kind of Beautiful, and then Lessons in Love). But it turns out it isn’t too bad and has its moments of amusement and charm. It helps that it looks glossy and quite expensive, what with the escapist location filming in London, Cambridge and Los Angeles.

Brosnan, Hayek and Alba are really rather good, giving the kind of game, vivacious and likeable performances that so improve mediocre material, though I can’t say the same of Malcolm McDowell, who plays Brosnan’s sexist father in terrible casting as the two actors are only ten years apart in age. And, apart from McDowell, the movie is all quite painless.

Rated R for language, sexual content, some nudity and drug use. Brosnan called Hayek’s orgasm scene ‘a highlight of my acting career’.

Brosnan and Hayek have previously portrayed a couple in After the Sunset (2004).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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