There’s no reinventing the wheel in Mads Matthiesen’s Teddy Bear, a rom-com light on both the romance and the comedy. Most of the film’s humor comes from its central conceit, which sounds awfully like the setup for a joke we might've heard before: Dennis, a bodybuilder living with his mother, and pushing 40, goes to Thailand looking for love. Hopelessly naïve and shy, Dennis is in every sense the heart of the film. Cutting a hulking six-foot-four figure of an unimaginable number of pounds, Dennis’s personality seems completely at odds with his brutal physical presence: Danish bodybuilder Kim Kold plays him as a lonely giant, entirely clueless regarding all women but his mother.

After years of pining for a woman to love, Dennis sees his uncle come back from vacation with a new Thai bride and covets their apparent happiness. Fully expecting to find a lifelong partner, he too heads to the exotic country, but instead unwittingly plays the part of sex tourist. Because this is a sweet and simple yarn, the fact that an appropriate love interest—Toi, played by Lamaiporn Hougaard—is introduced not far into the narrative will come as no surprise. Due to the general lack of imagination, the film's most interesting aspect remains its gimmicky protagonist (even if Arnold Schwarzenegger already set the precedent for crossing over from bodybuilder to starring role). Kold has no trouble anchoring the frame in a compelling way. Without being sexualized by the camera, he’s constantly objectified both diegetically and non-diegetically, reduced to his brawn and credited with very little by way of brains. The idea of a male protagonist so physically powerful and yet with so little agency within his own life is novel enough to compensate for much of the film’s blandness.

The best moments of Teddy Bear concern Dennis's bodybuilding. Matthiesen is particularly adept at showing the camaraderie and bond between men who train together at the gym. It’s these moments, where Dennis gives posing pointers to his bodybuilding buddies, that help keep a viewer rooting for him to find love despite his shyness. The reverse is unfortunately true for his romantic counterpart, as is too common with female love interests. Efforts to gussy Toi up as anything other than a plot device are nonexistent. It’s a small comfort then that in all of Matthiesen’s gaping and ogling at Kold’s improbable form, he somehow forgets to ogle Toi even once.