Leap Year (2010/I) (PG)
Cast: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
Release Date: January 8, 2010
Runtime: 1 hr. 40 mins.
Genre: Comedy, Romance
"Leap Year" follows one woman's determined quest to get married to the perfect guy, despite what fate has in store for her. When their four-year anniversary passes without a marriage proposal, Anna decides to take matters into her own hands. Investing in an Irish tradition that allows women to propose to men on Feb. 29, Anna decides to follow her boyfriend Jeremy to Dublin and get down on one knee herself. But airplanes, weather and fate leave Anna stranded on the other side of Ireland, and she must enlist the help of handsome and surly Declan to get her across the country. As Anna and Declan bicker across the Emerald Isle, they discover that the road to love can take you to very unexpected places.
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The majesty of the Emerald Isle is on full display in Leap Year, an opposites attract romantic comedy starring Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, Enchanted) and Matthew Goode (A Single Man, Watchmen). Director Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, Hilary and Jackie), shooting entirely on location in Ireland, takes us on a whirlwind tour of the country's breathtaking landscape, reveling in its fabled fairy-tale charm.
Pity, then, that such a magnificent setting is so mercilessly defaced by Leap Year's unrelenting mediocrity. The film's dubious premise, testing the already loose limits of rom-com believability, casts Adams as Anna, a type-A career girl who flies to Ireland intending to pop the question to her feet-dragging boyfriend on February 29th, aka Leap Day. Why Leap Day? Because, according to some idiotic old Irish tradition, that's when women are allowed to do such things. (Click here to watch Adams herself try to explain the plot.)
Unfortunately for Anna, weather problems force her plane to land far away from Dublin and her would-be fiance. Trapped in a tiny coastal town with no reliable transportation at her disposal, she enlists the help of a scruffy, abrasive barkeep named Declan (Goode) to drive her cross-country so she can reach her destination by the 29th. And thus begins the traditional rom-com mating ritual of sexually-charged bickering followed by moments of abrupt, awkward intimacy.
While watching Leap Year, I swear I could hear the Irish countryside quietly weeping as it witnessed Goode and Adams slog through the film's succession of trite misadventures, the talented actors straining in vain to manufacture some semblance of romantic chemistry as an assortment of jolly Waking Ned Devine types futilely spurred them on. Oh, if only Greenpeace could have intervened and put a halt to such wanton environmental desecration. It's the worst thing to come out of Ireland since The Cranberries.
Hollywood.com rated this film 1 star.
Synopsis
"Leap Year" follows one woman's determined quest to get married to the perfect guy, despite what fate has in store for her. When their four-year anniversary passes without a marriage proposal, Anna decides to take matters into her own hands. Investing in an Irish tradition that allows women to propose to men on Feb. 29, Anna decides to follow her boyfriend Jeremy to Dublin and get down on one knee herself. But airplanes, weather and fate leave Anna stranded on the other side of Ireland, and she must enlist the help of handsome and surly Declan to get her across the country. As Anna and Declan bicker across the Emerald Isle, they discover that the road to love can take you to very unexpected places.