Not one of Brooks's best

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2005)

I don't know why people like this movie, it's the most uncomfortable movie of all time. Not one scene in this movie clicks, all the actors look like they are expecting someone to come out of nowhere and start blasting away with a shotgun at any second. There's this one scene that's so stupid and hammy, it's when Greg Kinnear is sitting in his apartment and these thugs come in and suddenly Kinnear starts saying: "oh no, oh no" repeatedly. DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE. How could he know they were going to beat the stuffing out of him? In another scene, plain-faced Helen Hunt is arguing with her mother, and suddenly Hunt says "what do you want mom? What do you want mom?" There is no basis for her verbal attack on her mother, it comes out of nowhere, the movie just keeps switching around all over the place like some twitchy drug addict. Then when Lisa Simpson sits down with the flash cards to talk to Kinnear, the whole scene between them is so clumsy and ham-handed that I'm convinced Brooks went to McDonalds and told everyone to just keep filming while he was gone, and that it would turn out all right.
There were a couple of things in this movie that were just too precious, the fist one being Hunt's date. They go back to her place and start to get romantic, then her son has an asthma attack or something and her date gets all turned off and leaves. HELLO? Didn't she think for a minute and say "oh, I have a kid" before they agreed to a date? Or maybe she's in the habit of bringing home strange men, I don't know. Another thing that annoys me is when Hunt runs down the sidewalk yelling Melvin's name to get the cab. It doesn't make any sense, there are cabs everywhere in NYC, and as far as I could see it wasn't rush hour. Why did she run all the way down the sidewalk just to get his cab? And how would she even know that he was getting a cab in the first place? So stupid.