The Unseen Movie Review

A Lot Like Love

People who like lighthearted romantic comedies are, generally speaking, an undemanding lot. When they pay their hard-earned cash for one of these films, they don’t expect a life-altering experience. They aren’t after any massive revelations about relationships and love. All they want is a pretty boy, a pretty girl, a bit of a misunderstanding, some implausible set-ups and a happy resolution, all interspersed with some moderately amusing jokes. People who don’t like romantic comedies usually, and often wrongly, write the whole lot off as mindless pap. On this occasion, the latter group is entirely correct.

Starring the badboy toyboy of Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, who hit the big time with his wonderful stoner turn in the hilariously braindead Dude, Where’s My Car? and perennial also-ran starlet Amanda Peet, best known for Bruce Willis flick The Whole Nine Yards, this ranks as a perfect example of cynical Hollywood exploitation of a target audience’s expectations with almost no actual delivery on the promise.

Perhaps most insulting to the intelligence of lovers of romantic comedies is the fact that this is a not so subtle rip-off of one of the finest examples of the genre, the classic that is When Harry Met Sally: boy and girl meet, hate each other, go their separate ways, meet again, fall in love. The plot, however, is where all similarities to that infinitely superior film end.

The really shocking thing is that this is directed by Nigel Cole, the man responsible for the satisfactorily whimsical British menopausal comedy Calendar Girls. He really should have known better than to follow up with such unmitigated, derivative rubbish. But to be fair on the guy, from his half-hearted efforts it seems he may well have been aware of how useless this movie was going to be from the start.

It really is a great shame that two such likable actors as Kutcher and Peet have to resort to this kind of nonsense to attempt to revive their sagging profiles. Neither are really star material, but both have the kind of easy likeability and charm which should have made them a shoe-in for an on-screen romantic pairing. But there’s no chemistry, no comedy, no character to their performances, just an all-pervading sense of “been there, done that” and ever-rising boredom.

One to avoid – even on DVD. Let’s just walk away and pretend it never existed. It’s films like this that give romantic comedies a bad name.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM