Love Actually Plotlines Ranked By Sadness

Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Colin

“Colin, god of sex,” as he refers to himself, gives us another subplot that’s almost strictly comic relief, admittedly mixed with a fair amount of blatant sexism. But that’s the joke. As an overly confident goofball at home in the U.K., he’s convinced himself that his failings in love are due to the women of his country being too stuck up and therefore unreceptive to his charms. The solution? Hop on a plane to the good ol’ US of A, where a woman just HEARS a man with an English accent and can’t help but fall all over herself with admiration and lust. Which is totally exactly 100% what happens.

He meets a group of female roommates at a bar in Wisconsin and is immediately the belle of the ball, with his (inexplicable) foreign mystique, his silly-dude charm, and the irresistible dialect in which he says words like “bottle” and “table.” As I said, the gag relies a bit on the overt objectification of these American women, but the joke is just an overblown exaggeration of our very real cultural interest in British men. And Colin, though he technically gets exactly what he thought he’d get out of his trip, is still a big dumb goof. But at least he’s a big dumb goof in a film otherwise full of intellectual morose Brits, so his story is a welcome and nevertheless enjoyable change of pace.