Jo Hartley is digging up the roots of a conspiracy when someone pinches her vegetables in this British mockumentary that doesn't yield as many laughs as I'd want from this crop.
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00:00 There's a mystery growing in the very British mockumentary, "Sweet Caroline".
00:05 Jo Hartley is a competitive vegetable grower who discovers one night that someone is stein her marrows!
00:11 And she enlists the aid of a next-door neighbor with a crush and a conspiracy theorist to solve it,
00:15 uncovering a vast conspiracy in the process.
00:19 The tone of "Sweet Caroline" is somewhere between "This Country" and "Curse the Were-Rabbit if you took the Were-Rabbit out of it".
00:24 And although it acknowledges a couple of extra camera guys,
00:27 it still plays very fast and loose with the mockumentary format.
00:30 The cast has fun with the silliness of the semi-improvised script,
00:33 although I do think that an attempt to add a bit more emotional resonance with a subplot
00:37 involving an ex-husband who's dying of cancer feels very out of place.
00:41 Some recognizable faces pop up fleetingly,
00:44 Ashlyn Beers, a private investigator who's into swing parties,
00:47 and Alice Lowe turns up for two minutes with a cod-Russian accent,
00:50 but the laughs are more patchy than I'd expect.
00:53 Although it's mostly good-natured and a lot of vegetable innuendo on the level of
00:57 "Is that a carrot in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"