Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

There’s something about the English accent that seems to fascinate many Americans. Being an Englishman in New York, I’m amazed that not a day goes by without my boss granting me his flawless impression of how an English person speaks. It’s a bizarre fetish and one which I’ll never quite understand. Us Brits don’t seem to share the equivalent obsession with the American way of speak.

With this constant stream of people giving you their best Britspeak, in some sort of weird cultural pissing contest, one gets highly well-versed on the art of the bad English accent. After not too long you can pick it up immediately. It grates, punishes, rapes the ear with it’s awkward inaccuracy. So when a film such as Caffeine arrives, a film set in London but with a mostly American cast, an odd, uneasy feeling starts to spread...

The film takes place over one day in a London coffee shop as a wide array of ‘wacky’ staff members and ‘quirky’ customers are involved in a series of ‘zany’ occurrences. There’s the manager Rachel (Marsha Thomason) who has just discovered her boyfriend has cheated on her and is shutting him out of the café all day. Vanessa (Mena Suvari) is trying to keep her unstable grandmother under control, something which proves nigh-on impossible as the day progresses.

Dylan (Breckin Meyer) is waiting for that all important call from his agent to let him know if his book will be published and he will be saved from serving coffee forever. The last member of staff is Tom (Mark Pellegrino) who’s gay so he cries a lot and minces around. Then there’s the patrons. Laura (Katherine Heigl) is suffering a nightmare blind date with a misogynistic idiot. Danny (Mike Vogel) and Mike (Andrew Lee Potts) are young guys so they do things like smoke weed, talk about porn and shit themselves. Seriously.

There’s more characters but to be honest I’m bored even thinking about them, let alone actually writing about them.

Right from the early moment where Mena Suvari releases her improbably poor idea of how an English person speaks its clear we’re in really, really, deviously bad movie territory. The whole idea of going all the way over to England to make a film, making sure the location seems genuinely English and then filling the cast with Americans, none of which can muster one believably English word among them is just completely insane to me.

The film is 100% inauthentic, not a moment of it even slightly fools you. Okay so it doesn’t help that the script is astoundingly bad as well. The film leaps from one unbelievably stupid and crass situation to another, all the time thinking its achieving a winningly irreverent atmosphere. People talking about relationships in a frank manner is not funny enough by itself, especially when these people do totally unidentifiable things. How to pick the worst? The guy who has a threesome with a pair of twins? The guy who accidentally flashes ...