BRIAN VINER reviews Beatles-based musical comedy Yesterday 

Yesterday (12A)

Rating:

Written by Richard Curtis, with Danny Boyle in the director’s chair, the lovely Lily James on screen and a soundtrack full of Beatles songs, if a team of marketing consultants had been tasked with devising a crowd-pleasing British movie, Yesterday would be it.

Throw in the East- Enders actor Himesh Patel as an Anglo-Asian romantic lead, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar as his parents, Sarah Lancashire as a matronly Scouser and pop superstar Ed Sheeran affably (if a little woodenly) playing himself, and you can practically hear the high-fives as the consultants congratulate themselves on coming up with a surefire hit.

But that’s precisely the problem. Yesterday doesn’t feel as though it’s been lovingly nurtured from an original idea all the way to the big screen; it feels as if it’s been brainstormed around a big table.

Himesh Patel plays Jack Malik, a struggling singer-songwriter from Lowestoft who comes round in hospital following a road accident during a worldwide, 12-second power cut

Himesh Patel plays Jack Malik, a struggling singer-songwriter from Lowestoft who comes round in hospital following a road accident during a worldwide, 12-second power cut

When it comes out later this month, it might well become the colossal global money-spinner it is meticulously designed to be.

Yet the actual film really doesn’t add up to the sum of its highly promising parts. It’s all very well to team the writer of ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’ with the director of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. But Curtis and Boyle are not quite Lennon and McCartney. It’s the Beatles music that makes their film sing. Without that, Yesterday would be nowhere, man.

The premise is three-parts whimsy, one part plain nuts.

Patel plays Jack Malik, a struggling singer-songwriter from Lowestoft who comes round in hospital following a road accident during a worldwide, 12-second power cut. An exchange with his old schoolfriend and loyal manager, Ellie (James), offers the first hint that he is apparently the only person on the planet who knows the Beatles existed.

Ed Sheeran stars in the movie as himself and is part of a stellar British cast, with the movie directed by Danny Boyle

Ed Sheeran stars in the movie as himself and is part of a stellar British cast, with the movie directed by Danny Boyle

Inexplicably, the electricity shutdown has wiped out all evidence of them. Type the Beatles into Google and all

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