Product: Prime
Rating: 2.0
Good Plot But Poor Implementation
In the beginning there is Adam and Eve; so is Hollywood genre. A man and a woman and how they tackle obstacles and finally happy together is the basic form of the very popular romance genre. The rest of the Hollywood romance story is to twist it as much as possible.They start with age segmentation "Melody Fair" / "On Golden Pond"; to race "Far From Heaven" / "The World of Suzie Wong"; to different sex orientation "La Cage Aux Folles"; you can name as many variations as you want. And, of course, cross over i.e. mixing genre: comedy/romance "When Harry Meet Sally"; thriller/romance "Vertigo"; action/romance "Bonnie & Clyde", is another popular choice; and they did try every possible mixing as you can imagine."Prime" is another effort from Hollywood to extend this formula. However, new twist doesn't guarantee success; that is why they always deploy top notch actors and actress to ensure their effort is not in vain e.g. "Something's Gotta to Give (2003)" with Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves. Can you think of better deployment than these? This time the twist is about a young guy with an older divorcée and his mother happens to be her therapist. It certainly sounds interesting even without seeing the film yourself. On top of that, you got two Oscar frequent visitors - Uma Thurman & Meryl Streep.Unfortunately, the interesting part stops right there. You would expect lots of fun part come from this to-be-discovered relationships and a new interpretation of these roles from these top stars. But as most failure efforts did, the film has several funny scenes but doesn't add together and after the relationship-discovery it actually falls apart or should I say nothing surprise us. (Resolution of conflict relationship is a good line to play with, but the screen writer just threw it away!) Another recent failure along the same line is "Must Have Dog (2005)".The rule of thumb of genre development is to provide reasonable plot expectation for the audience and add some twists here and there to surpass their expectation. A recent good example is "Just Like Heaven (2005)". The film provides some twists into a so- familiar plot i.e. "Ghost (1990)". See it if you must but you won't miss much if you don;t.