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Charles is a frequent wedding-goer, along with his urban haute bourgeoisie friends - the sharp-tongued Fiona and her wealthy brother Tom, his own deaf brother David, his punky flatmate Scarlett and the effusive Gareth and his lover Matthew. None of them, however, have ever risked marriage themselves. But at a wedding in Somerset, Charles is struck by a beautiful stranger, Carrie. Fiona promptly tells him that Carrie is a slut and out of his league anyway, but Carrie surprises him by taking him to bed. The next morning, Carrie goes back to America, leaving Charles befuddled.

At a London wedding two months later, Charles sees Carrie again, but his hopes are dashed when she introduces her new fiancé, Hamish. Charles spends the rest of the evening beleaguered by vengeful ex-girlfriends; he is particularly embarrassed to see the over-emotional Henrietta, who bursts into tears. But Carrie rescues him. Hamish has left for a business trip, so they spend a second night together.

A month later. Charles receives an invitation to Carrie's wedding. As he dutifully goes to buy her a gift, he runs into her. Over coffee, Carrie enumerates the 33 men she has slept with. Charles makes her a fumbling declaration of love, but nevertheless finds himself at her wedding shortly afterwards. At the party, Fiona admits to him that she has always loved him, and Henrietta, who has a new boyfriend, seems much more together. Then Gareth suddenly has a heart attack. The friends reconvene at his funeral. Afterwards, moved by Matthew's speech, Charles wonders if he will ever feel that way about anyone himself.

Ten months later, however, Charles is to marry Henrietta. As his friends, apart from Fiona, meet their ideal mates, Carrie reappears, conveniently separated from Hamish, throwing Charles into confusion. He decides to go through with the wedding anyway, but with David's encouragement he jilts Henrietta at the altar. Carrie and Charles agree not to get married ‘til death do they part.

Weddings, those microcosmic maelstroms of greed, snobbery and unwise tailoring, provide fertile ground for comedy, but countless temptations to slide into sitcom humour. Indeed, by the time Rowan Atkinson's Father Gerald (Mr Bean had he graduated from the seminary) has stepped out to garble the second couple's wedding ceremony, there doesn't seem to be much to choose between this and Yorkshire TVs David Jason vehicle A Bit of a Do. With a wealth of easy-target caricatures to lean on (ghastly ex-girlfriends, drunken bores, senile old men - and this film doesn't miss one), a movie about a wedding can often feel like a wedding itself -two hours stuck in a crowded room with a lot of people you don't know very well and don't particularly like.

But Four Weddings and a Funeral, which is structured like a film student's senior project, strives to be more than that and ends up as something worse: a smarmy little fable about the magic of true love. This is a lazy, Sleepless in Seattle-style romanticism, the kind that assumes that if we're told often enough that the two dull protagonists are meant for each other, we'll eventually believe it and care sufficiently to be warmed by the inevitable hearts-and-flowers finale. Of course, it would help if there were a single spark of chemistry between the two leads. Andie MacDowell looks ravishing enough for anyone to be smitten at first sight, but as a light comedienne she is disastrous. Her idea of sprightly repartee is to pronounce every syllable, and she can't quite hide the furrows of perplexity around her eyes - she doesn't seem to grasp her own witticisms. You can't help remembering how she was dubbed by Glenn Close in Greystoke, and thinking how much livelier this film would be if she were dubbed by Helen Lederer. She is not helped, either, by having to pretend that she has fallen for someone who looks like a chipmunk. Hugh Grant, his hands full playing repressed-and-hesitant, does not exactly radiate sex appeal here (and the fact that he looks all of 22 hardly lends credence to his fretting about ending up a sad old bachelor). The fact that a post-credits photomontage shows them with a baby does little to assuage our suspicions that the affair will last six months.

The film does score points with those of the supporting cast that it graces with personalities. Kristen Scott Thomas makes a marvelously brittle Fiona; when she confesses to an elderly lady that she has never got married because she is in love with someone who never thinks of her, she makes us feel how much this admission has cost her, how morbidly proud and secretive she is beneath her icy exterior. And the film has a pleasingly matter-of-fact way of establishing Gareth and Matthew's relationship - they're a convincing couple, and you wish you could see more of them, because the brief glimpses of their affectionate rapport ring true.

But too much time is taken up with the spectacle of Charles and his improbably alternative flatmate (Scarlett appears to be a 'Sarf' London punkette, so you wonder just how she got in with the independently wealthy crowd) racing to various churches, and people making boring speeches after dinner. You can feel how earnestly the film-makers tried to vary the visual aspect of the ceremonies - posh London wedding, Somerset country church, draughty Scottish castle - but the fact remains that by the time Charles' own wedding rolls around, you wish they had left it two weddings and a funeral.

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