Written by: Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont
The premise is remarkably simple and saccharine: Hot-to-trot city girl decides to follow her boyfriend to Ireland to propose to him on leap day. Along the way, she meets a down-and-out country boy who teaches her that she doesn't really want what she thinks she wants. She is conflicted, then, about who she truly loves, has an epiphany, and they all live happily ever after.
Given that synopsis, you'd predict that this movie would be a gagger. And, to an extent, it is. But, it wasn't as horrible as I had thought it would be.
The movie had two major weaknesses holding it back.
The first: a plot so transparent it could be used as glass. This is a necessary evil in the rom-com genre, but it definitely made the movie feel longer than it needed to be because you could see every event in the plot coming several minutes ahead of time, and every minute in the interim between the moment you saw it coming and the moment it actually arrived was generally irrelevant.
The second: Amy Adams. This movie could have been better with just about anyone - including an inanimate cardboard cutout - in the main role. Whether it was a flaw in the writing of the character or in the way Adams tried to portray her (or, most likely, a combination of the two), there was very little to like about the main character. As an audience in a movie like this, we're supposed to root for the main character to find true love. But in this case, she was so absolutely not-endearing that I found myself hoping that there would be a twist in which the male lead would just abandon her on the side of the road. (Alas, it didn't happen.)
This was a pretty standard rom-com, and it definitely was held back from being rated even "decent rom-com" by these major issues. I don't feel like spending any more time re-living this film here.
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