| Leap Year | |
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Well, yes Amy Adams IS endearing but not when all she’s called upon is to play an uptight American who learns to loosen thanks to the whimsical Oirish charms of a pub landlord on the Emerald Isle. At all, at all. The surprise is not just that Amy Adams signed on the dotted line, it’s not that even she cannot salvage any moment of pleasure from this painful cinematic experience. It’s certainly not Matthew Goode’s wandering accent as the accidental love interest. No, perhaps the biggest surprise is written on that director’s chair. Anand Tucker. One of the directors of Red Riding has followed up the bleakest TV experience of the decade with such a hideous slice of slushy fantasy. Anna (Adams) is a Boston business woman, living the dream. She’s successful. Her boyfriend Jeremy (Scott) is a surgeon. The tenant association of the upmarket apartments she’s always wanted to live in want her and Jeremy to move in. The only problem is that Anna is waiting for the proposal - and it never comes. Learning of the old Irish tradition that women can propose to their men on Leap Year day, Anna heads to the Emerald Isle to surprise Jeremy who’s at a conference in Dublin. Unfortunately, the weather has other ideas, which is why she’s had to get a fishing boat from Wales and is now relying on surly, women-hating pub landlord Declan (Goode) to get her to Dublin in time for February 29th. See how funny this is going to be? He’s rough and ready and mono-syllabic. She’s prim and proper and chatty. They’re, snigger, like chalk and cheese. Ooh boy, you can imagine the hilarity, can’t you? Putting aside the “seen it all before” nature of the feuding couple who are, actually, starting to like each other rather a lot (never saw that coming, did you?) and, of course, the fact that, actually, women can propose to men anywhere on Feb 29th (or indeed, the other 365 days of the year), Leap Year somehow manages to sink below such clichés and plumb even greater depths than you might image. Tedious, plodding, fatally flawed and putting Irish reputations back 20 years, Leap Year is going to be one of the year’s worst. All we can hope is that a film this bad only comes along once every four years... Rating: * Review: Neil Davey We actually love Amy Adams here... honestly. Check out Julie and Julia or Sunshine Cleaning for proof. |
It’s hard to say what’s most surprising about Leap Year. It’s certainly not the fact that it fails on both the “rom” and the “com” side of things – because it certainly isn’t the first film in this over-populated genre to have that problem. But then, you expect at least some pleasures because it stars Amy Adams and she’s charming and sweet and incredibly endearing, right? 
