If you like your humour broad and your national stereotypes broader, welcome to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. In the tradition of heart-warming travelogues like Eat, Pray, Love, this comedy sends a star-studded cast of septuagenarians off to India in search of life, love and, um, better wi-fi. It's basically Calendar Girls meets The Inbetweeners Movie and if that doesn't sound appealing to you, then I suppose you were doing something else with your Friday night. Good for you. 

I don't want to mince words: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an awful film. But I feel particular need to justify myself because I was the only person under fifty in a packed audience which seemed to really enjoy the movie. So maybe BEMH just wasn't intended for me. This demographic gulf widened even further when the film ended and, disrespectful lout I am, I went to leave while everyone else waited till the end of the credits. Awkward. 

Anyway, once the cast have arrived in the titular 'home for the beautiful and elderly', various sit-com antics ensue. Foppish zombie Bill Nighy is the self-deprecating, sardonic one. Penelope Wilton is the frigid bitch. Ronald Pickup is the randy one. While Dev Patel does his best to inject some life, his romantic subplot eventually devolves into a bad episode of Neighbours. Special award for apathy must go to Tom Wilkinson, who reads his lines like they're written on the back of his pay check. 

The dialogue is, without exception, filled with airport-novel wisdom and agony aunt witticisms. Characters actually speak lines like “You represent a modern India she can't accept”, just in case the audience needed a hand. Most absurdly, unrepentant bigot Maggie Smith (who refuses treatment from a black doctor at the beginning of the film) is miraculously cured of her racist ways after eating a bit of tandoori and awkwardly interacting with a Hindu maid. On the evidence of this film, the UN should hire director John Madden to mediate all racial disputes in future. 

The aforementioned Calendar Girls is actually a good model for what BEMH should have been: fluffy and frivolous, but charming. The film's saving grace are its admittedly beautiful locales, but even these can't redeem a hollow story. I don't begrudge the cast of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel a holiday; just leave the cameras at home next time.