Romance about green card that should have gotten a red card

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2009)

For anyone thinking we'd see an end to the long string of insufferable movies that make up much of the romantic comedy genre (like "He's Just Not that Into You" and "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past") I present "The Proposal", two hours of stupid fluff directed, written, and performed without the slightest care toward making a watchable movie. "Knocked Up" this is not. More like "Knocked Senseless."
Sandra Bullock returns to being a romantic lead as Margaret Tate, an executive editor-in-chief of a book publishing company. She's tough as nails and because she's a strong woman in a high position, its only natural that every one think her Satan. Or so it goes in most stupid movies like this one. Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds) is her long-suffering assistant. When Margaret's visa expires and she faces being sent back to Canada, Andrew and her hatch a deal to get married in order to keep her here. She gets to keep her job, and he finally gets promoted to editor. Just when the government starts investigating the relationship, Andrew must bring her home to meet the family in Alaska in order to sell the ruse.
Sitcoms usually start in this way and considering that, its no wonder the sitcom is dying. The screenplay by Peter Chiarelli moves along in predictable fashion and actually finds a way to dumb down a genre that doesn't really need to try that hard in the first place. The couple bicker, then feel guilty, then somehow fall in love. Some family melodrama (involving dad, played by Craig T. Nelson, wanting Andrew to be apart of the family business) is tossed in for good measure. It's a good movie for anyone who find surprises distracting, think that a romance should work just because, and who get kicks out of weak one-joke premises, the joke being that the couple is reluctant toward being stuck in this fake relationship. It's a tiresome idea that, at best, leads to cheap laughs like a scene where the two mistakenly run into each other naked or weak payoffs like when Andrew feels emasculated during Margaret's telling of how he fake-proposed. And director Anne Fletcher hasn't met a desperate attempt at comedy that she can't force to the point of stark awfulness. A scene where Margaret is given a lap dance by an out of shape exotic dancer or when she must chant and dance around a camp fire with Andrew's grandma just come off as eye-rollingly tedious.
I'll leave Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds alone here. They're both trying hard to make some of this funny and this relationship worth caring about but neither Bullock's turn as a career-oriented ice queen or Reynold's knack for sarcasm is enough to contend with this very paint by the numbers romance. Betty White, as the sort of movie-grandma who likes to poke around people's sex lives and divulge things about her own, gets a few little laughs here and there but for the most part "The Proposal" is no marriage in movie heaven and might as well just be left standing at the altar.