Following his success in the wonderfully wacky British TV series Spaced, Simon Pegg’s leap to the big screen has seen him catapulted into mega-franchises like Star Trek and Mission: Impossible (and possibly even Star Wars). One step of that journey involved dabbling in a few rom-coms which landed with mixed results (Run Fatboy Run, Hector and the Search For Happiness). While he’s switching up the material for the forthcoming assassin comedy Kill Me Three Times, which is getting a US release next month, he hasn’t quite abandoned the romance oeuvre just yet.
In Man Up, Pegg joins Lake Bell as a couple who inadvertently share a romantic evening together. His hopeless singleton initiates a date with a prospective partner he recently met online. In a twist of incident, however, as is often the case in the world of rom-com matchmaking, he doesn’t meet who he’s supposed to and meets Bell’s quirksome lass instead.
Chemistry fizzes in this first sneaky trailer and sparks fly as they must. Whether or not the end result will be a formulaic effort or a unique spin on the genre doesn’t matter. These two are as watchable as ever.
Ben Palmer directs Man Up from a script by Tess Morris that earned positive feedback after time on the Britlist (the UK version of The Blacklist). Mira Park (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz) produces and Olivia Williams, Ophelia Lovibond, Rory Kinnear, Stephen Campbell Moore, Sharon Horgan, Harriet Walter and Ken Stott co-star. The film arrives in the UK on May 29th, but no US release date has yet been confirmed.
Nancy (Lake Bell), is done with dating. 10 times bitten, 100 times shy, she’s exhausted by the circus. So when Jack (Simon Pegg) blindly mistakes her for his date, no one is more surprised than her when she does the unthinkable and just —- goes with it. It’s going to take a night of pretending to be someone else for Nancy to finally Man Up and be her painfully honest, awesomely unconventional self… but will Jack also Man Up, and be able to get over her duplicity? Best just to let the evening unfold, roll with the consequences, and see if one crazy, unpredictable, complicated night can bring these two messy souls together.