A Combination Of Dreadfully Boring And Sugary Sweet

Rating: 3/10 (11 February 2009)

The opening scenes of this movie portray a passionate and obviously comic argument between Holly and Gerry (Hilary Swank and Gerald Butler.) For a couple of minutes, the argument was humorous. It quickly grew old, but unfortunately it went on and on for about ten minutes. By that time I already had a bad taste in my mouth from this movie that never really went away. Yes - it's the proverbial "chick flick," so perhaps I shouldn't have expected to really like it, but romantic comedies can still be fun - chick flick or not. In this case, however, the humour seemed to be forced and artificial - everyone seemed to be trying to hard to be funny; it wasn't coming across as natural. Combined with a rather lifeless performance from Swank as well as the ridiculous character of Denise (Lisa Kudrow) - surely one of the dumbest "serious" characters ever to appear in a movie - the whole thing fell apart rather quickly. It was at best a weak romantic comedy, with actors who didn't really seem to click and characters who didn't appeal to me particularly. The one exception might have been Daniel. I felt sorry for him when he ended up stuck in the middle of Holly's problem of not being able to let go of Gerry. Gerry (her husband) had died of a brain tumour, but before he died he had put together a plan to help her move on and begin to enjoy her life again: a series of letters and gifts being delivered to her from him, each of which pushed her a little farther along the path to healing. This just struck me as a generally lifeless movie that accomplished very little in the end, although I did appreciate one bit of philosophy found within: "life is a great and short and terrible thing and none of us are going to get out of it alive." I'm a minister. I think I might be able to make use of that someday. Aside from that, though, there was precious little here that interested me. 3/10