On a tropical holiday David (Xavier Samuel) meets an Australian girl named Mia (Laura Brent) and they quickly fall in love. At a surprise party back home in the UK, David tells his three mates that he and Mia are getting married in Australia. The lads are unhappy about this because they don't want to lose him and also because they'll have to fly over there. They're an odd bunch. Tom (Kris Marshall) doesn't want to grow up. Graham (Kevin Bishop) is always pushed around by the other lads and Luke (Tim Draxl) is miserable, trying to win his ex-girlfriend back. The men arrive in Australia and are at the mercy of Mia's strict father Jim (Jonathan Biggins) and his wife Barbara (Olivia Newtown-John). Jim is a wealthy senator, looking to impress his contacts with the lavish wedding but is frequently at odds with his other daughter Daphne (Rebel Wilson),who may or may not be a lesbian. The lads find themselves in trouble when they try purchasing some marijuana from a drug dealer with emotional problems and also when they have a crazy night together, the day before the wedding. They wake up to find they've been tormenting Jim's prized campaign sheep.

Colourful British wit makes light of black Aussie humour, burying memories of awful local comedies from the early millennium. The film is an Australian-UK coproduction. It was directed by an Australian, Stephan Elliott, but written by Dean Craig, the same Brit who penned Death at a Funeral (2007). That was another film I greatly enjoyed and this is a similar mixture of genres. It combines fish out of water with comedic farce, along with setups from countless other films. It is impossible not to recall the likes of Death at a Funeral and even The Hangover (2009). Yet the essential ingredients for a great movie on its own rights have not been forgotten. This is the funniest Australian film I have seen in years. What's important here is how the comedy is played out. The lads here are fools and regularly make a meal out of everything they touch. Yet you can't bring yourself to hate them because we understand they're out of their depth in a foreign environment, both geographically and class-wise too. And this might just be my own jet- black sense of humour talking but there is something immensely appealing to watch and listen to with self-depreciative humour. The lads in this movie are gifted comedians. They know how to keep a straight face as they poke fun of themselves, their social problems and eccentricities. I enjoyed the film enormously for this reason, the lack of winking, but also the variety of comedy too. On top of the rapid quips between the men and their jabs at each other, there are some delicious sight gags too. The film never makes a huge point of them, so look sharply for a picture of the Queen wearing Joker makeup, or the face of an airline passenger after Graham tries to defend his Hitler moustache. I enjoy comedy when it speaks for itself and lets us read the jokes without any help. By far my favourite scene is, I think, when Graham has to give an unprepared best man speech and is so high that he spends the whole time talking about something indescribable.

The silences of the guests and the way the camera scans the reaction of their faces is just hysterical. Screenwriter Dean Craig employs a lot of the same farce-like comedy from Death at a Funeral, with people behind doors, o r moving in and out of rooms secretively. The material is reused cleverly because director Elliott gives us a complete overview of the impending chaos. Take the scene where the boys are trying to attend to the sheep they've tormented. The camera cuts to the corridor outside the room, providing vision of who is about to walk in on them. Just like the wedding speech scene, they know how to really build the tension and extend the jokes. The comedy works because there's a lot at stake. Just when you think a giant ball crushing the wedding is the craziest the film can become, you're wrong: it continues to reach new levels of insanity. For as well constructed as a lot of the film is, some of the editing is noticeably choppy. Snippets of scenes sometimes feel out of place, or interrupt confrontations and could have been removed altogether. This is a small complaint that most people won't notice and its mostly in the first half too. For all of this film's lunacy, and there's a lot, the tension comes from characters that have resemblance of actual feelings. David is a sympathetic lead because he's torn between his mates, his only real family we learn, and a far more prestige life that he is trying to adapt to. I particularly liked it when he and Mia started questioning how little they know about each other. It's a sensible turning point. The lovable lads are very distinctive and funny with their sets of problems but they share some of the laughs with the women too. I particularly liked Olivia Newton-John as the mother with a wild side. This gem of a film was absolutely delightful and I sincerely hope its quality is indicative of all Australian films this year.

If you can go open minded into this and like comedies that really just go for it, you will like this very much. The premise is almost everything there is to the movie, mixed with the characters that get introduced you just know where this is heading. But "disaster" is too funny in this case and the entertainment value is high throughout.

Of course as with many comedies you could start asking (or questioning) the roots of the problems. Or really be mad about characters inability to cope with some things, while making similar mistakes most of the time. But this would take all the fun you can have with the film, so I just hope you can enjoy this as much as I (and a few friends) did!

English David (Xavier Samuel) meets Australian Mia (Laura Brent) on holiday: they fall in love and, by the time he arrives home, they are engaged. So orphan David goes to his wedding, at Mia's enormous house in the Blue Mountains (Laura's Dad is a Senator) accompanied by his three best friends and family substitutes Tom (Kris Marshall, a glib, super-confident chancer, Graham (Kevin Bishop, awkward, graceless, and socially inept) and Luke (Tim Draxl, raw and bordering on suicidal from a recent romantic break-up). All would probably have been well had Tom not taken a small detour to buy some weed, and had Graham not accidentally acquired the dealer's stock of cocaine...

The small amount of advance word here was not good, and I found the early parts of the film irritating and filled with "Well, he just wouldn't do that" stuff - why does David walk in the pouring rain from Trafalgar Square to St Paul's (at least half an hour) carrying his Polynesian carving on his way home? Why didn't he just get a bus nearer to where he lived? He wouldn't walk in through his front door with dog mess still on the sole of his sandal, he'd scrape it off outside. He wouldn't throw his wet shirt over there etc. etc. And the characters were annoyingly clichéd - could anyone be as stupid as Graham? And Luke's maudlin whingeing about his ex-girlfriend left no room for any other characterisation at all. Then factor in the idiotic detour to buy drugs, which I couldn't envision anyone doing on the eve of their best friend's wedding, and I'm a third of the way through the movie having chuckled a few times, but with any amusement far outweighed by irritation. Next we meet a comedy drug dealer, and Mia's dad Jim, a cliché bullying Dad who regards the wedding as more important for its networking opportunities than for what it means for his daughter, and I'm even more annoyed (to be fair, there has been a moderate amount of laughter from the audience, most of whom were much younger than me).

But at this point we also meet Rebel Wilson as Mia's sister Daphne, and Olivia, Newton and John as mum Barbara, and things begin to look up. The wedding morning consequences of the stag night shenanigans are genuinely amusing, and I'm starting to warm to the film. In true farce manner, actions have consequences, and those consequences have further consequences, and things start to unravel. Graham ends up in the position of having to give the best man's speech, a role to which he is spectacularly unsuited, and this sequence left me helpless with laughter as he reels from one faux pas to another, each one being worse than the one which preceded it. From here to the end, the film lurched through a series of disasters, some physical, some situational, some character-based, most of them tasteless, and nearly all of them very funny indeed.

Rebel Wilson is naturally very funny, and it was a delight to see Olivia, Newton and John (ageing most attractively) joyfully attacking areas which Grease's Sandy, even in black leather, would have been far too prim to address.

After an unconvincing opening, this film made me laugh out loud more than any movie I can remember for a long time, and that is what I take away with me.