Boooooooooooooooring

Rating: Null/10 (5 December 2004)

'Original', 'quirky' and 'exiting'. Yeah, right. This is so much the quintessential run-of-the-mill romantic comedy that you just sit pinned to you chair waiting for Hugh 'Bad career move' Grant to rear his ugly head somewhere.
How this film managed to run away with acclaim both from Sundance and LA Film Festival is a mystery to me. It's the same old story in a indie-ish wrapping: sympathetic if somewhat bewildered, confused and disorganized boy (who happens to be rather goodlooking) meets chaotic and somewhat neurotic yet highly attractive girl possessing all the vigour he lacks. A deus in machina (death of paralyzed mother) sets wheels in motion, yet some kind of problem arises (in this case the young man's dominant father, who actually seems quite irrelevant for the entire movie).
However, because these two completely unique people are sooooooo right for each other, and love is soooooooo strong (yuck) they still manage to pull it off, including the mandatory desperate-last-second-dash-at-railway-station-after-tearful-goodbye scene in the end. (Well, it's actually an airport here. And I haven't given it away for you, after 20 mins. this is bleedingly obvious anyway.)
This movie is all that it's pretending not to be: calculated, commercial, predictable, un-intriguing, repetitive and boring.
It's probably a good career move for Zach Braff. He's made a good bid to launch a career as a teenage poster boy for the next ten years or so with this flick. Good career move? Dunno. Profitable, at least. But for those of us who actually took something of a liking to him and his somewhat offbeat 'Scrubs' series, it's a disappointment nevertheless.
Actually, they should have made the movie out of Peter Skarsgaard's graveplundering-gravedigging-dope-head character instead. Now that could have an interesting movie.
But then again, Zach Braff couldn't have sported his now well-worn 'oh I'm so confused/bewildered gaze'.
If you insist on killing off your neurons with a movie of this kind, rent 'Four wedding and a funeral' instead. The original is still the best, even if Hugh Grant is nauseating by now.