Stolen goods

Man Up is a British rom-com starring Simon Pegg as Jack and Lake Bell as Nancy. Nancy’s problem, at the outset, is that she is 34 and still single — has yet to ‘man up’ — and is therefore a failure, and if you can buy that as a premise for a film, then that’s your look-out. I’m old and I’m tired and I can’t be always telling you what’s right and what’s plain wrong.

So it opens with Nancy, who is single (at 34!; the horror!), attending a friend’s engagement party and refusing to come down from her hotel room as her love life, we are given to understand, has been somewhat disastrous and now she has a pathological fear of putting herself out there. ‘I’m such a failure,’ she keeps boo-hooing, more or less. In the end, she has to be talked down by her sister Elaine (Sharon Horgan) over the phone, although if I were her sister I’d say, ‘You’re boring me, you big sap.