Now Add Honey (2015)

I like Robyn Butler and the writer/producer is the best thing in the movie; it is just a shame that as writer she did not gift herself with a better vehicle for her talent. I found this a bit of a mess, really. There are too many competing characters and story lines and in the end none of them feel satisfactorily resolved or executed.

With the clever title, and her previous work with husband Wayne Hope on the small screen series like Upper Middle Class Bogan and The Librarians, Robyn Butler gets to do the best shtick and has some great lines but she has surrounded herself with an unlikely and unlikable group of characters making it hard to root for her and her brood. The actors playing her daughters are fine, and 'Wicked' star Lucy Durack has some lovely moments, but the overplayed and contrived tangled web with her sister played by Portia de Rossi and her insufferable daughter played by Lucy Fry give the movie its artificial and irritating elements that for me the movie never recovers from, and they are introduced within the first 10 minutes!

There are some significant themes and ideas fighting for screen time here, but ultimately they are buried underneath the contrived set of slapstick and mostly unfunny situations that befall the leading character. Maybe 15 year old girls and their mothers will enjoy this more than I! As a female empowerment tale, it feels muddled and compromised; as a screwball comedy it simply isn't compelling enough or humorous enough to forgive some of the extraneous characters viewers are forced to endure, and as a familiar motif of outsider crashes in on an ordinary family and inevitably changes the dynamic, it is not sharp enough in its crafting. As much as i admire the work of this pair of writer/performers, i think they bit off more than they could chew with this project. Robyn Butler's talent alone could carry a project without so many shoehorned elements to compete with.