Alvin (Martin Freeman) and Ellie Finkel (Mandy Moore) seem to be a happily married couple in London. Peter (Jonathan Silverman) and Janet (Melissa George) are their married best friends. With issues in the marriage, Ellie suggests swinging.

Freeman and Moore make for a bland couple. They don't have much chemistry which leaves them without any rooting interest. I don't care about saving their marriage. The characters are flat. The humor is cruel but worst of all, it's broadly bland. With all the inappropriate takes and foul language, none of it is that funny, not even as an accidental shock humor. I'm not sure who writer/director Jonathan Newman is. His resume doesn't stand out to me. It's surprising that he has a cast of good actors. I don't know what they read in the script.

I guess that sums it up good. Hopefully you don't have bad feelings towards the actors involved (especially Mandy Moore),because you wouldn't be able to like or enjoy the movie otherwise. But Martin Freeman and Moore do have a special chemistry and it works for the purpose of the movie. It's not that you will be cheering at the screen (I'm assuming here),but you will like them.

If that is not enough, maybe the decent comedy in place will please you. The theme is an adult one, which although there is not that much going on (explicit wise),the movie is rated R in America. In Germany and other European countries this probably looks different, because it is tame by their standards. A heads up to what you may expect.

Well, this is downright peculiar, and no mistake. We have what appears to be a perfectly straightforward comedy/drama of morals/manners, whereby after 9 years of marriage, Alvin Finkel and his American wife Sarah find their marriage getting a bit stale, so they try a partner swap with another couple, then separate. Look a bit deeper though, and things aren't quite so straightforward.

This film has a definite air of an American reject being set in London instead of New York, with Martin Freeman playing the mildly neurotic smart-arse part which might have been played once upon a time by a young Woody Allen. This feeling is added to by Sarah's grandparents (Jerry Stiller and (I think}Beverly Klein) being very Jewish without there being the slightest indication that Alvin and Sarah are Jewish, apart from their name (not many English Jews called Alvin, incidentally). The grandparents serve no dramatic purpose other than being necessary for the payoff of one of the gags, by the way. Also, at one point, Angus Deayton actually utters the word "gotten". Sorry, but no-one in England says "gotten."

So this strange transAtlantic vibe pervades a story which would actually work a lot better if we were able to care about the people in it. I nearly cared about Mandy Moore's Sarah, but I cared not a jot about Martin Freeman's character. And without anything at stake, the dramatic element of the movie did nothing for me.

There were places where it was amusing but, broadly, this was a misfire with an identity crisis.