Endearing and memorable, if imperfectly written and acted.

Rating: 6/10 (29 March 2015)

This is a compact movie with a simple conceit that initially looks to be hokey but ends up driving home its payoff quite memorably. Were the writing and acting better, it could have been a classic, but alas it falls well short of that mark. Owen Wilson was an acting high point, but even then his performance was just OK - nobody else was in the least bit identifiable as an actual human rather than an actor playing to a script. True, some of the the 'historical' figures were supposed to be caricatures, but even beyond this, the 'deeper' characters had no depth or chemistry. Worst of all, for a movie supposedly set around Paris, all I saw was a really poor American take on Paris; very little reminded me of that city which I know quite well. Heck, the "French" characters' "Frenglish" accents were barely identifiable as such.
A real pity, since, as I said, the payoff and the idea were very decent for a compact movie like this. I did not dislike it, but thought the acting and writing let the whole thing down quite a bit. A 90 minute good date movie for an undergraduate trying to impress a girl who fancies herself an intellectual but has never been to Paris.