Breaking up is hard to do, but for none more so than Dave, the protagonist of the gently amusing romantic comedy “Bad Cupid.”
It’s been a year and he’s still pining over the woman who dumped him (Christine Turturro) in the opening minutes of the film. From then, it’s up to his brash cousin Morris (the expressive Briana Marin) to try and set him on a different track.
Enter John Rhys-Davis, who commands action in Dave’s life just as he takes over the film Neal Howard directed with Diane Cossa, and co-wrote with Ira Fritz and Anthony Piatek.
The hulking, grizzled Welsh actor best known for portraying Gimli in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (in which he also provided the voice of Treebeard) and as the Indiana Jones sidekick Sallah in a couple of movies, Rhys-Davies is the title character here, though certainly nobody calls him by that name.
He appears in the opening scene interrupting a Niagara Falls proposal by knocking the wedding ring into the drink with a red baseball bat. He insinuates himself into Dave’s dilemma by appearing as a gruff barfly in a dive bar. Dave wants to talk to his ex on her wedding day, but Rhys-Davies’ Archie, as he’s known here, kidnaps the prospective groom. The stakes are thus raised, but not so much that they don’t drive around and discuss the pros and cons of buying versus leasing; or spin an elaborate metaphor about love using the contrasts of New England vs. Manhattan clam chowder.