Marital problems: "The Knot"

If there were two subgenres we just haven't seen enough of lately, they'd be wedding movies and Noel Clarke movies. The Knot - which Clarke wrote and starred in, but has left to newcomer Jesse Lawrence to direct, lest anyone accuse him of stretching his talents too thin - joins the two in unholy matrimony, and very nearly jumps a shark onto another bandwagon: half the film has been shot by the characters on camcorders, resulting in the kind of found footage that sorely needed losing again. Let's dip in, shall we? 

At the five minute mark, someone pulls a dildo out.

At eight minutes, we have the introduction of Mena Suvari, presumably here to secure overseas funding: she's greeted by a fat man in his underpants, and suddenly adopts the expression of someone who realises further American Pie reunions wouldn't be such a terrible idea after all.

The eleventh minute sees a stripclub flashback that left me wanting to remove all traces of my genitalia, closely followed by a hen party interlude that suggests Clarke was aiming for equal-opportunity crassness.

In minute seventeen, somebody drops the ring into a toilet. No-one laughs.

The twenty-first minute sees bride Talulah Riley reduced to her underwear, continuing 4.3.2.1's Noel Clarke tradition of ogling young actresses in their pants.

Minute twenty-three offers a severed penis in a jar.

Minute twenty-four ushers on Lenny Beige actor Steve Furst as a Teutonic hairdresser who is - wait for it - ever-so-slightly camp!

The bar being set low by this point, the above actually risks provoking laughs of a sort, but fear not, because by minute thirty-four, we're back to the level of Riley doing a poo in her wedding dress. (Remember Bridesmaids, anyone?)

There's another whole hour of this kind of material, interspersed with incredibly annoying, pseudy inserts in which the bride and groom muse to camera on what marriage means to them, a conceit presumably meant to distinguish The Knot from all those fluffy-meringue wedding movies waving dildos and severed penises around. Every other minute cues up some wholly terrible, piss-weak musical offering from the very bottom of the Devil's iPod Shuffle. Its commercialism is rank, and - worse - hopeless, because it's going after pounds that have already long been spent on product substantially funnier, and far less sour than this: even the recent A Few Best Men had rather more endearing leads than Clarke and rent-a-herbert Jason Maza. One semi-notable development: Clarke looks to have discovered a new Danny Dyer in groomsman Matthew McNulty, sold to us as an upgrade because he looks to smell of cigarettes and Lynx body spray. Thanks, Noel. But fuck off for a bit now, eh?

The Knot opens in selected cinemas from today.