A mediocre romantic comedy with many tedious passages

Rating: Null/10 (27 February 2005)

This is a corporate Will Smith vehicle. It is a mediocre romantic comedy with many tedious, trite passages. On the positive side, it is inoffensive; devoid of the toilet humor, violence, profanity, nudity, sex and misogyny that infest most modern movies. That means wide variety of people could see this, but if they have any taste, they will be bored and restless. I was having a hard time keeping my eyes open. I was yawning. I was disgusted by the many recycled plot devices and bits of dialog. At times the movie seemed to be made from discarded pieces of "Jerry McGuire" and a bad Albert Brooks movie. There was actually a "poignant disclosure" scene where the Eva Mendes character tells how her sister "almost died" as a child when she fell into an icy river. (These scenes always involve bodies of water.) It's just that witless. I'm guessing that Will Smith ad libbed some of the dialog and had creative input. If so, he's the living embodiment of the Peter Principle. We need to keep a rein on out of control actors. Just because you look good and can stand up in front of a group of people doesn't mean that everything that comes out of your mouth is gold. To be fair, the writer and director of this movie really messed up too.
At this point I have to say that the opinion poll here was obviously rigged. There's no possible way that the largest number of viewers chose to give "Hitch" a ten. This movie isn't a ten, even to people that liked it. For them, it's a six, maybe a seven. I'm not buying those votes. Somebody at the studio rigged this poll.
We have to be thankful for one thing. Luckily Kate Hudson isn't working now, because if she was, this feeble romantic comedy would undoubtedly have starred her and we'd be seeing her modest gifts and plain face once again, as well as hearing about and viewing her each day of our lives, whether we liked it or not.
Remember, you can get your money back if you leave a movie in the first part of the movie. Some chains give you fifteen minutes and some half an hour (into the movie itself.) If you're wondering if the movie gets better after that; it doesn't.