Great performances hold attention away from less substantial structure

Rating: 7/10 (15 November 2009)

As romcoms go, this one is pretty high quality on the performative standard. Bullock and Reynolds are attractive and believable, the dialog is sharp, the story is interesting, the characters are fun to pay attention to, it stays close to familiar territory while being new enough to be interesting and not downright boring. As a date movie goes, this is a better example of the genre and I can definitely see why it made so much over the summer; and with this and Miss Congeniality, Bullock is certainly a new kind of chick flick hero who manages to be very sexy while not being very girly or ridiculous.
On the technical side, not so much. The continuity in this movie is atrocious (literally, a big deal is made about a man frozen in mid-sentence with his glasses in his hands, then cuts to his reaction and the glasses are nowhere to be seen--understandable if the glasses weren't a major part of his reaction), the lighting is very uneven (though the wedding was nice and the Alaskan summer was realistic), and sometimes the blocking itself loses complete track of where the characters are in space. Anne Fletcher obviously spent a long time working with the actors and getting the performances while not concentrating so hard on the blocking and camera movement. I still say it works, since Bullock and Reynolds really hold all of the attention. If there were any problem with the world created at all it would mostly be that the supporting characters and background is not nearly as interesting as the leads.