Kevin James is the Redeeming Factor

Rating: 5/10 (29 March 2005)

Yes this does contain spoilers if you are completely dense about the Hollywood formula for romantic comedy's. Man meets girl, man likes girl, man and girl are too different to get together, man and girl get together anyway, one of them does something to screw it up and they break up for 15 minutes, man and girl get back together and live happily ever after. How incredibly shocking. (Sarcasum in case you didn't catch that.
This film did have some entertaining moments. Unfoutunatley they all focused around the character played by Kevin James. The character in and of its self is nothing out of the ordinary. Another product of formulaic Hollywood cinema. Lets face it, every film needs a socially dense fat guy to stumble around like an idiot. Foutunatley James was able to bring something extra to the character despite the fact he wasn't given much to work with. Realistically, James himself accounted for about four out of the five stars I gave in the rating of the film.
Eva Mendes did nothing for me in this film, well nothing good anyway. As the rest of this film goes her character is again a very formulaic and very much not interesting character. The thing is she as an actress didn't bring anything interesting to the character either. All she managed to give was a flat, simple and boring performance. Still the worse thing that this character brought to the film was in the script. Remember at the top when I mentioned that one of the people in the couple inevitably screws up. Well Eva Mendes screwed up the relationship with Hitch big time. Most of the time this part of the formula works because the thing that they did was usually by accident, not out of spite, and it doesn't permanently harm anyone. What Eva Mendes' character did in this film had me rooting against the inevitable reconciliation at the end. This woman is a journalist, who on very slim evidence released a story that could have and very easily would have destroyed the lives of three people. This was not a likable person and it made the intended happy ending a morbid one for me.
I though the cinematography left something to be desired. The color composition wasn't great, the picture quality as a whole wasn't spectacular, and the images for a lot of the film simply didn't seem to be lit correctly. Still, nowadays it seems that studios don't think they need great cinematographers for certain genres, comedy is one of them.
Really, I'm tired of these Hollywood comedy's that have been done to death. Don't get me wrong, I like comedy but it can't be something where you can actually feel your brain rot as you watch stupid people get into stupid situations that eventually leads to a stupid and tacked on solution. Please don't make me wait until the next Charlie Kaufman film before I see my next comedy. Still if thats what I have to do to avoid patronizing, dumbed down films like this than so be it.