Looking: The Movie

I thought that the two television series' this follows rather petered out, so I was a little surprised that Andrew Haigh and Jonathan Groff decided to make a sequel. "Patrick" (Groff) has returned to San Francisco for the wedding of "Agustin" (Frankie J. Alvarez) and "Eddie" (Daniel Franzese) but as expected, much of the focus here is on how he is going to deal with his two exes. "Richie" (Raúl Castillo) has ambitions to take his barbering onto the road whilst he learns that his former boss "Kevin" (Russell Tovey) had reunited with the boyfriend ("John") whom he had been instrumental in splitting up. His other lifelong pal "Dom" (Murray Bartlett) still hasn't really progressed since his relationship with florist "Lynn" (Scott Bakula) came a cropper and finally, there's the long suffering "Doris" (Lauren Weedman) who seems to be constantly treading on the eggshells of the failing and flailing relationships from the men she loves. What follows now does offer us a little more by way of closure that the abruptly cancelled television series didn't really have time to, but as I watched this rumble along I felt I appreciated more why it had been ditched. There really isn't anything original, or especially engaging, in this and after a while I also recalled that I felt the character of "Patrick" to be a bit of a self-centred pain in the ass whom the affable and decent "Richie" ought to have given a wide berth pretty much from the start. Barring a slightly unexpected revelation from the one-scene with Tovey, the rest of this comes across as little better than a couple of tightly stitched television episodes that lack for much character, charisma or even jeopardy and neither the dialogue nor the acting really sustained my interest. If you were a fan of their earlier and more entertainingly spontaneous antics, then this is probably an useful tying off of loose ends, but otherwise it's nothing special at all, sorry.