If not for an endearing cast and some occasional splashes of Richard Curtis’ signature British charm, “Yesterday” would be a complete waste of its clever premise — not to mention the money it must have cost to license 17 of the Beatles’ most famous songs.
As it stands, this sweet but vacuous exercise in suspending disbelief is an overstuffed and underwritten misfire; a studio-engineered crowd-pleaser so convinced “All You Need Is Love” that it loses sight of some other essentials along the way: Believable characters, elegant pacing, a script that develops an actual heart instead of just nodding its head to a steady drumbeat of Hallmark emotions.
For a movie that manages to inspire a funny and self-effacing performance from Ed Sheeran, “Yesterday” gets tripped up on the basics.The premise, dreamed up by one-time “The Simpsons” writer Jack Barth, is ingenious for how specifically it taps into a fantasy that should
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