Corny? No. Crap? Yes.

Rating: 1/10 (14 July 2007)

This film is absolute drivel. Romantic comedy is a tough genre - we live in a very cynical age, decades after Betty Blue and an absolute eon since An Affair to Remember. These days, if people like each other, they get it on, and there are very few social, ethical or religious barriers to prevent it. Therefore, to make a romantic comedy work, a lot of filmmakers have turned to supernatural barriers - the time-slips of The Lake House and Groundhog Day, the curse/wish-fulfillment in Big, a fictional mental disability in 50 First Dates - to keep their romantic leads apart. When they stick to more prosaic story lines, the modern audience isn't convinced. Nancy Meyers seems to be aware of this and and two elements of this film reveal that. First of all, she has this self-reflexive habit of commenting on Hollywood conventions, Eli Wallach's exposition on the term 'meet cute' being the most glaring example. Secondly, she seems to be winking at the audience when she has Kate Winslet declare that "Corny is good!" Except that this film isn't corny, it's flat. How you can put Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in the same room and fail to create any chemistry at all is incomprehensible. Maybe they cancelled each other out, hot-plus-hot-equals-cold. Only Winslet's character achieves plausibility. Jake Black's comic potential is never exploited, and he looks embarrassed when he slaps high-fives with the pensioners, a scene that exhibits a gushing rush of sentimentality. Cameron Diaz's character is just two-dimensional, and Jude Law's character makes no sense at all - single fathers cannot go out on the pish and the pull as much as this guy, it just isn't feasible. All I got from this film was a new-found respect for Hugh Grant - the guy can take this kind of material and elevate it to something that touches you. The Holiday, however, is as crass, commercial and convincing as a dancing Santa lamp ( I have one, it's rubbish). Worth a look if you are interested in why romantic comedies so often fail, even with a stellar cast, but otherwise - avoid at all costs.