Lame Year November 17, 2009

Let me preface this post by assuring you that I am a big Amy Adams fan and I do not have my doubts about this film just because I didn’t get a callback to be an extra in the film. It has nothing to do with that whatsoever.

Leap Year is a romantic comedy starring, as you may have guessed, Amy Adams, as a woman who “has an elaborate scheme to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Day, an Irish tradition which occurs every time the date February 29 rolls around, faces a major setback when bad weather threatens to derail her planned trip to Dublin. With the help of an innkeeper, however, her cross-country odyssey just might result in her getting engaged.”

That’s fine, it all sounds like a very pedestrian rom com that just might be watchable and half-decent due to the presence of Oscar-nominated Amy Adams. But then you watch the trailer and em…she’s actually hitching a lift from Cardiff, Wales to Dublin, Ireland. Considering that this is actually an American-Irish co-production I really hope that there’s a ferry journey included in there somewhere.

The rest of the film looks fairly unfunny, with the usual slew of Irish stereotypical characters and awful accents (although Matthew Goode manages to do marginally better than Gerard Butler did in P.S. I Love You). Any Ireland-set scene in the trailer looks like a carbon copy of something from P.S. I Love You (which wasn’t great in the first place), or the Irish scenes from Marley & Me.

I’m disappointed that Adams signed on to something that really doesn’t seem to have much going for it. Hardly a great follow up to Doubt, or even Sunshine Cleaning. Although, I’ve never not liked an Amy Adams film, so who knows.

Maybe if my expectations are this low I might actually enjoy it. After all, I liked Bride Wars…

Leap Year is released, at least in the US, on January 8th. Maybe for the Irish release they’ll do it around the end of February. Because that would make sense.