HONEYMOON

How soon can a comic fantasy fizzle? Just as soon as you find out that the title refers not only to the central (and virtually the only) situation, but also to the heroine, Miss Honeymoon Holt.

Honey is a bratty motormouth searching for love in all the wrong neighborhoods of London. And now, as the story opens with the shrewdly chosen tableau of her hen party careening around the West End in a rented limo, she’s finally found Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Available. Ed, her Intended, is “kind and good and wise and decent and hard-working and—er—clean and sexually functional and non-smoking.” But he’s not Alex, the Love of her Life, who disappeared a few hours after he entered it for a magically platonic night seven years ago to become a wealthy Hollywood wannabe and hasn’t been heard from since, at least until (1) he turns out to be the bridegroom for whose wedding Honey’s kid sister Ven has been doing the feng shui, and (2) he pops up with his bride Cherelle, the world’s most self-effacing agent, at the same New York hotel where Honey and Ed are spending their own wedding night. It must have sounded like a great idea when TV/screenwriter Jenkins pitched it—a distaff Heartbreak Kid with two new marriages at stake instead of just one—but it falls flat because there’s nothing to support the juicy central concept: no logical lead-in, no compelling complications to follow, just Honey’s adorably vapid chatter, her six time-tested steps in How to Get a Husband, and a thousand warmed-over digressions.

For every line that snaps (“Sometimes I think reality is the most painful thing in life”), a dozen go limp (“I do have friends who are male . . . but they’re either gay or I’ve slept with them”).