Nothing Special At All

Rating: 3/10 (15 September 2010)

In my review of The Break-Up, I expressed my frustration at modern romantic comedies. This one is that exactly. I mean, this movie feels like the stereotypical romantic comedy. More formulaic than just about any film that I've ever seen.
After awhile, I started getting the same feeling that I did when I saw Prom Night: I was calling out what was going to happen next thirty minutes before it happened. It got quite annoying. There's a scene for an obvious setup for a gag in which Bullock and Reynolds end up in the same room without seeing each other and both get naked to take a shower. It's such an obvious setup for "hilarious misunderstanding" that I wanted to turn off the film. And the film is *so* predictable. They force themselves with each other but then *gasp!* they start falling for each other. I mean, *who* could have seen *that* coming?!
As for the performances, they were nothing special at all. I thought Reynolds did okay, but his character was entirely uninteresting to me. As for Bullock, she was bad. She wasn't Kristen-Stewart-bad, but she was still worse than I've ever seen her before. She just seems so lazy with it, as if she didn't really care about the picture. Sandra Bullock played an executive type character who will be kicked back to Canada from whence she came, so she must marry to stay in the country and with her job.
But here was a *huge* problem I had with the movie: why did that guy *care* if they were really in love or not? A marriage is a marriage, dude, so calm down. It's not like they were forging the marriage, so what is going to matter if she just does it to stay in the USA? I did not like The Proposal much at all. Of course, I liked Betty White, but that's because she was Betty White. And even she was subjected to some really lame setups.
The Proposal wasn't total crap, but it's devotion to formula is what made me so frustrated by it. It might have had some potential if the filmmakers had bothered to do anything new with the film, but they didn't bother. No effort put into story, so no effort by me to be entertained.
3/10