What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Directed by Shekhar Kapur, What’s Love Got to Do With It? follows a British documentarian (Lily James’ Zoe Stevenson) as she sets out to detail her long-time friend’s (Shazad Latif’s Kaz Khan) upcoming arranged marriage. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that What’s Love Got to Do With It? fares best in its breezy, entertaining first half, as Kapur, working from a screenplay by Jemima Khan, does an effective job of establishing the picture’s assortment of colorful protagonists and the almost inherently compelling scenario in which they find themselves – with the above-average atmosphere perpetuated by James’ affable turn as the sympathetic central character. (It’s clear, however, that Emma Thompson, cast as Zoe’s off-the-wall mother, remains the picture’s most potent and compelling attribute.) The movie’s slow-but-steady descent into passable-yet-somewhat-tedious territory, then, is due in large part to the lack of chemistry between James and Latif’s respective figures, with this feeling certainly exacerbated by the latter’s flat, charisma-free performance, and it doesn’t help, either, that Shakur devotes the narrative’s final half hour to melodramatic happenings that just aren’t able to pack the emotional punch one might’ve anticipated – which does, in the final analysis, cement What’s Love Got to Do With It?‘s place as a just-okay endeavor saddled with a wildly shifting tone and overlong running time.

**1/2 out of ****