Metacritic reviews

There’s really only one reason to see Fisherman’s Friends, and it’s the singing.

A faulty delivery device doesn’t diminish that truth or take away from the requisite happily ever after we know is coming. Purefoy, Hayman, Middleton, and Mays are too good to let that happen. They’ve willingly embraced the clichés to honor a story brimming with the kind of hope we need currently and it’s worth following their lead.

Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.

This is a movie for instant fans; it's explicitly for anyone who doesn’t needs any convincing about why we'd instantly love them, much in the same way its underdog tale is eagerly meant to be seen as pure, and even more cloyingly, as crowd-pleasing.

The movie this most closely resembles is the similar “true story” “Calendar Girls,” only with no nudity and less comic edge.

Fisherman’s Friends is a somewhat tone-deaf comedy drama. With its by-the-numbers storyline of a jaded London music industry exec (Daniel Mays) who finds romance and true meaning in his life in addition to an acapella group, plus a subplot about a village pub under threat from an out of town property developer, the film is wearisomely predictable and parochial in its outlook.

Even in the realm of scrappy British underdog comedy, there is a clear line between endearingly ramshackle and downright slipshod. Fisherman’s Friends blithely crosses it, never to return, from the moment it chugs out of port.

Between predictable, commonplace plot turns and characterizations of music business types that are even more obnoxious than the norm, the movie’s straining for effect is less than ingratiating.