Birthday Girl

British romcom about a guy discovering that his new mail-order bride from Russia can't speak English. At all.

John Buckingham's (Ben Chaplin) shock at learning this pivotal plot-point is just a tad inconsistent with the earlier montage of his reviewing various candidates' video profiles, but we can hardly blame him for snapping up quickly the one who looks exactly like Nicole Kidman, right down to her toned abs.

It pretty much goes without saying that Nadia then turns out to be far less than she seemed, and the inevitable crime caper which John finds himself embroiled in breaks his heart about as much as it can. His motivation for agreeing to rob the bank that he works in is only really clarified afterwards, but the overall story doesn't suffer for this.

It is one of those movies when you keep on wishing that the principle character would just go to the police, but given that their crime-solving technology seems to be seriously out-of-date here (this was made in 2002), maybe that wouldn't have helped any. Also John Buckingham is arguably a better man than that, sacrificing everything he has by the film's conclusion, apparently not so much for Nadia as for her innocent dependent.

Well what do you know - he actually did turn out to be the thoughtful guy that he claimed in his advert after all.

Available here.