Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on October 2009

©Touchstone Pictures

It’s a sad state of affairs, not to mention a measure of the general mediocrity of the movies opening this week, that I am reduced to featuring in this space a Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. (The other releases are even worse, and The Final Destination is dubbed into Japanese!) Sandra plays a high-powered publishing executive threatened with deportation to Canada. Her solution is to coerce her long-suffering personal assistant (Ryan Reynolds) into telling Immigration that they are to be married. Immigration doesn’t buy it, with the upshot that she, for appearances sake, has to spend the weekend in Alaska with his family (Craig T. Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, Betty White) doing fish-out-of-water things until they inevitably fall in love. It’s pleasant enough, and the performances are adequate, depending on your SB rom-com tolerance level, but the material stinks. There’s not an original frame in the movie. Made by choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher. She made 27 Dresses, so it’s not like you haven’t been warned. It was a good idea to move the action to Alaska, however. It gives you some gorgeous scenery to look at while you’re waiting for the movie to end.