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This film is proof positive that Bullock and Grant can make any film watchable and entertaining, no matter how ineptly made it is. It's the bog-standard opposites-attract romantic comedy: Wealthy New York property magnate George (Grant) hires plucky activist lawyer Lucy (Bullock) to run his legal department. They clash personally but become indispensable to each other professionally; he has the money, she has the conscience. When she realises she can no longer cope with the way he has taken over her entire life, she gives her two weeks notice and hires a replacement (Witt). But of course under the superficial hostility they're really deeply in love.

The film has three primary assets: Grant, Bullock and some very sharp dialog. All three keep us relatively entertained even as the plot gets more and more predictable. That writer Lawrence (Miss Congeniality) is a ham-fisted director is fairly irrelevant. That the film is badly edited and full of painfully obvious musical choices doesn't really matter. That it completely wastes the supporting cast (Witt, Haig as George's pushy brother, Ivey and Klein as Lucy's liberal parents) is a shame. But this is Grant and Bullock's show and they are centre stage the whole time. Grant is in his smart-but-hopeless, shallow-but-charming mode, while Bullock is doing her brilliant-but-clumsy, dowdy-but-gorgeous thing. We know, right down to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen next. Fortunately, watching the two of them is just about enough to keep us smiling.

themes, innuendo

28.Jan.03

Dave Haviland, London: "Note to Hugh Grant: hire a team of bodyguards immediately to protect Richard Curtis around the clock, because without him you may well end up wasting your considerable talents on the likes of Mickey Blue Eyes and this, which feels like nothing so much as a clumsy attempt to simply weld together two better films. From Four Weddings and a Funeral we get Grant’s emotionally-retarded toff, the requisite American female lead, and even that film’s Bernie. You’ve Got Mail provides the full chocolate box fairytale of New York, the subplot in which local and national are bywords for ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the token black friend who again is given literally nothing to do. The laziness of the execution here really grates. The main characters are quite charmless, and completely unsuited; the supporting characters exist solely as sounding boards for the leads; and the funny moments simply aren’t." (30.Dec.03)