Stolen goods

Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the outset, is that she is 34 and still single — has yet to ‘man up’ — and is therefore a failure, and if you can buy that as a premise for a film, then that’s your look-out. I’m old and I’m tired and I can’t be always telling you what’s right and what’s plain wrong.

So it opens with Nancy, who is single (at 34!; the horror!), attending a friend’s engagement party and refusing to come down from her hotel room as her love life, we are given to understand, has been somewhat disastrous and now she has a pathological fear of putting herself out there. ‘I’m such a failure,’ she keeps boo-hooing, more or less. In the end, she has to be talked down by her sister Elaine (Sharon Horgan) over the phone, although if I were her sister I’d say, ‘You’re boring me, you big sap. Why not just go read a good book or something? Many females lead full lives as undefined by a male, in the short term and in the long term. It won’t kill you.’ But all Nancy’s family treat her singledom as if it were stage IV cancer, and are thus compelled to check up on her condition at all times. Needless to say, Elaine is married, and has A Husband, so she’s all right. No fears there. Phew.

Next it’s Nancy on a train, compiling one of those self-improvement to-do lists — achieve ‘stronger thighs’; do a ‘black pant wash’ — as beloved by Bridget Jones, and as stolen from Bridget Jones. But she’s disturbed by the chirpy young woman sitting opposite who, it turns out, is an ardent advocate of a self-help bestseller and is on her way to a blind date with a man arranged round their mutual interest in said book.