Product: Prime
Rating: 3.0
If you've seen the trailer, there isn't much need to see the entire film
I have to agree with those reviewers who say that you really don't need to see the movie if you have seen the previews. This is not one of those films you watch to enjoy character development or see how the director expresses his cinematic craft. This is one of those films that you watch for one and only one reason: to see what happens. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the previews for this film were all over the place and I hate to say that the previews did a great job of distilling the entire movie down to about sixty seconds. It probably isn't saying something very nice about a film to be able to sum it up in a minute. So be it. Let me just say that the perhaps 5% of the key bits in the film that the trailers omit doesn't make the movie worth seeing.Before going on to make a couple of more comments about the film, let me just beef for a second about the current method of doing trailers in Hollywood. Why do they do it? Why do they feel compelled to give us about 80% of the plot in a trailer? It isn't as if there is all that much content to begin with. What we are given is a relatively enjoyable, light weight film meant to entertain for an hour or two. But since the story is built around a gimmick, once that gimmick is revealed in the trailer, what is really left? PRIME isn't by any stretch the only guilty party here, but it is one of the worse.If you have managed to miss the trailer then you might enjoy this film. No film headed by Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep can be truly dreadful and each does a fine job in their role, as does Bryan Greenberg in the only other important role. The film was originally to have starred Sandra Bullock, but she left the project when the director/writer wouldn't agree to changes she demanded. Interestingly Bullock would have been slightly too old for the part (she would have been a 40 year old playing a 37 year old) while Thurman was slightly young for the part (35 playing a 37 year old). Goldberg and Thurman make a convincing couple and the jokes are adequate, but in the end, there just isn't a whole lot to the film. And given that most of what the film did have was given away in the previews, watching it can be an unfulfilling experience. There was one fairly offensive character who didn't seem to place much of an essential role, the best friend of the Goldberg character who never gets beyond the first date with a woman and who always hits them in the face with a cream pie in revenge. A very unpleasant aspect of the film. I'm sure the writer saw it as having more significance than it ended up having.So, all in all I can't recommend the film. There are certainly many worse films and I don't think anyone will actually find it unpleasant. But just as it doesn't have many vices, neither does it have many virtues, the most Laodicean of films.