Grant and Barrymore - an unlikely combination that works!

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2007)

Who'd have thought that Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore could pull off something like this? Grant does his standard "I'm a complete airhead, but I'm terribly lovable" role, with his usual skill. Drew Barrymore has also made a career out of portraying airheads - bimbos who are a few french-fries short of a happy meal. At first blush, you'd expect a pair of ditzes like these to turn in a Lucy & Desi style slapstick shtick, but surprisingly, the combination works. The humor is generally understated, and Grant's funny lines spin forth with the impeccable sense of timing and delivery that he always brings to his work, while Barrymore does a very creditable job at holding up her end of the farce.
Of course, the plot is pedestrian, hackneyed and unoriginal, hence the down-grading from 10 stars to only 8. Boy meets girl; one of them doesn't like the other much, and anyway they're mis-matched; along the way a relationship develops, breaks, gets mended, breaks again. No surprises here. But the underlying thesis of an autumn-spring romance, while it, too, is far from original, does give both stars a chance to show what they are made of. The awkwardness of the situation, the slow dawning attraction, the petty generational conflicts are portrayed with a sensitivity that we would expect more from a serious drama than a fluffy feel-good comedy like this.
Top marks to the special effects crew for the retro video of the band "Pop!". The age regression techniques are utterly believable, such that it's hard to credit that they didn't actually dig out some awful archive footage of Hughie from some forgotten vault.
As a recommendation, I can't do better than report my wife' s reaction. She is a person who NEVER wants to re-watch a movie she's already seen. If she is watching a film on TV and begins to recognize it as something she's seen before, she immediately turns it off. So I was stunned, at the end of this film, to hear her suggest that we stay put in the theatre and watch the next showing as well. Is it worth paying good money to view on the big screen? Probably not, unless you're a die-hard Hugh Grant fan who wants to see him, larger than life, swivel his hips like Colin Firth in "What a Girl wants," or you're a latent pedophile who wants to ogle at giant, nearly naked Haley Bennet faking an orgasm on stage. Otherwise, just wait for the video.