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Such is the grinding Groundhog Day repetitious monotony of lockdown that I had to check my diary for when I last saw a movie based on the 1993 classic romantic comedy Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray at his curmudgeonly best, caught in a single day repeating again and again  from which he fears he’ll never escape.

Ah yes.  Here we go. Oh my god! Was it really only two months ago, in February of this year, that I sat down to watch teen time loop comedy The Map of Tiny Perfect Things? It feels like so much longer. I wasn’t reviewing that film and so I confess that after forty minutes or so I gave up, and made the following note: ‘The problem with remaking Groundhog Day is that it’s like Groundhog Day all over again.’

I had higher hopes (two monotonous months later), for the brand new time loop romantic comedy Palm Springs. I’d seen a couple of four star notices in the Sundays and it sounded like fun. I switched to Amazon Prime in expectation of something fresh and funny to lighten my lockdown fatigue.

How can I put this?  The problem with remaking Groundhog Day is… that it’s like Groundhog Day all over again.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti turn in perfectly fine performances as a sort of inverted Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, plus there’s JK Simmons who is never anything less than watchable. There are some genuinely funny moments with the emphasis on the word ‘some’. But the time-stamped, non-multiverse reality is that Groundhog Day got there first, said everything there was to say on the subject and did it better.

In their attempts to develop the concept, both The Map of Tiny Things and Palm Springs expand the palette by having multiple protagonists aware of their time loop plight. All this achieves is to underline why leaving the protagonist alone to unravel their predicament is so much stronger. When there are two (or three) of them, it means that they spend ages yacking about it and philosophising, and both movies lose momentum and become annoyingly, alienatingly self aware. The elegant simplicity of the original allows the action to drive forward without discussion, and the quest for meaning is trusted to the intelligence and imagination of the audience. That’s why Groundhog Day is a classic and Palm Springs and Tiny Things aren’t.

But on the bright side, hopefully lockdown is nearly over, and with any luck no one will try to remake Groundhog Day again in another two months… or they will… and I will be asked to review it… and, panic rising, I will search for something interesting to say about, and will start to scribble on my note pad:

‘The problem with remaking Groundhog Day is…’

Verdict: To be fair, Palm Springs is an inoffensive, competently executed, mildly diverting couple of hours of movie entertainment, but we have, literally, seen it all before. 6/10

Martín Jameson