Verdict: Turkey doesn"t even begin to cover it
Rating: No stars and the shamrock of shame
Leap years come round every four years, but dispiriting romcoms appear with depressing inevitability at least four times every year, and this is one of the very worst.
Leap Year doesn"t quite seem to last 366 days, but it"s 2010"s equivalent of Bride Wars: a romantic comedy that makes you hate not only the central couple you"re meant to be rooting for, but everyone involved with the production.
Like The Ugly Truth, it"s about an uptight control freak of a career-woman who has to be humiliated, I mean seduced, by a scruffy, laid-back man.
Charmless: Leap Year starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode
The usually adorable Amy Adams has allowed herself to be cast in this offensive role, and the script gives her precisely one thing on her mind, which is to marry her boring dolt of a boyfriend.
He"s a rich, hard-working, good-looking cardiologist (Adam Scott), but he buys her diamond earrings instead of that all-important engagement ring.
So - encouraged by her father (John Lithgow, in a one-scene wonder of a bad performance) - she flies to his heart surgeon convention in Dublin, where she plans to propose to him on February 29, the one day when a woman is allowed to do so.
Just in case we"re too dumb to take in all this information the first time, Adams gets to restate it over and over again, including once on a plane to Dublin, when she prattles gaily to a Catholic priest, who falls asleep, possibly because he"s old enough to have seen pretty much the same plot in much better films including It Happened One Night and I Know Where I"m Going.
If you"re sensible, you"ll nod off, too, and miss the rest of the movie.
Turbulence causes the plane to land - a shade bizarrely - in Cardiff, and the sea is too rough for the ferry. So Amy hires a boat which takes her to Dingle, County Kerry.
This is wildly implausible, since Dingle is on the western side of Ireland, would take many hours by boat, and is about as far from Dublin as it"s possible to be.
But geography is the least of this movie"s problems.
Oirish accent: Matthew Goode as Declan in the film
In far-flung Dingle, Amy Adams patronises the colourful Oirish locals with her highfalutin" city ways and annoys the local publican, who doubles as the village taxi driver.
Since he"s the only good-looking man in the place, and not like the rest of the population a cliched, geriatric, drunken imbecile spouting Oirish whimsy - and he"s played by Matthew Goode, a tall, handsome Englishman with an atrocious accent (it"s not so much Irish as dirish) - we know they are destined to fall in love.
But not before Amy has undergone all the usual dreary, unfunny humiliations that U.S. city girls have to endure in inhospitable rural parts - fused the lights of the village by trying to plug in her BlackBerry, been impeded by a herd of cows, trodden in faeces, fallen over in mud, had to pose as married in order to stay at a bed-and-breakfast. You know the kind of thing.
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Just like Renee Zellweger in New In Town or Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, Amy wears inappropriate footwear every chance she gets. Stupidly, too, she wears very little clothing, especially for Ireland in February.
One of numerous disappointments is that she doesn"t die of pneumonia.
It"s clear that the screenwriters have never been to Ireland in February. Or any other time. The vision of Erin in this movie dates from around the potato famine, and hardly anyone seems to possess anything as newfangled as a motor car.
Director Anand Tucker has made decent movies in the past, including Hilary And Jackie and When Did You Last See Your Father; but Shopgirl suggested he has little flair for romantic comedy, and Leap Year confirms that hypothesis. He also stages the most pathetic bar-room brawl in screen history, so action isn"t his thing either.
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The film has so many continuity errors that Mr Tucker seems to have directed most of it with his eyes shut, or maybe he, too, fell asleep on the plane to Ireland.
An apple being eaten by the leading man changes colour from one shot to the next, and carrots chopped by the leading lady are twice the size of ones she has been seen picking previously.
Leap Year was not filmed in February, or anything like it, since in several shots there are deciduous trees with all their leaves on.
In addition to being ineptly crafted, visually challenged and gratuitously insulting to the Irish, the film is astonishingly misogynistic. It makes the heroine look a nitwit from start to finish.
For example, she demolishes a hotel room in what is meant to be a scene of hilarious slapstick, but mistimed so tragically that she comes across as a nincompoop for not noticing what she is doing and stopping.
Numerous groan-worthy contrivances are needed in order to keep the battling couple together on the road. And the idea that she would fall for a man like the one portrayed by Goode stretches credulity well beyond breaking point, especially as he does little else but insult, mock and call her an "eejit".
What girl could resist such an uninteresting, charmless oaf, especially as he"s broke and runs an unsuccessful pub in the back end of nowhere? Just about anyone, I would have thought, including every woman in the audience.
Screenwriting this abominable doesn"t come along every week. U.S. writers Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan were also responsible for the abysmal The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas (2000), Surviving Christmas (2004) and Made Of Honor (2008).
Awarding a turkey seems inadequate under the circumstances. This being the awards season, I hereby present it with the plastic shamrock of shame.
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