Director: Garry Marshall, US, 119min
Stars: Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Helen Mirren
On general release
Even the likeable Hudson can’t elevate this lame excuse for what Hollywood likes to call a “dramedy” (drama-meets-comedy). There is precious little of either in this ludicrous fairytale about a high-flying fashion executive (Hudson) whose cocktail-soaked Sex and the City-style existence comes crashing down when her sister and brother-in-law are killed. Oddly, her sibling bequeaths the care of her three children to Helen rather than the other sister, the reliable Jenny (Cusack). Cue Helen having to relinquish her (vacuous) life and learn how to be a parent.
A film that should have said something edifying about grief and modern motherhood, with some bitter laughs thrown in, instead careers off-track early into a fantasy world populated by a cinematic Prince Charming (Corbett) who conveniently dries our protagonist’s tears. Such clichéd schmaltz is par for the course for Marshall, who also directed Pretty Woman — perhaps he is a tad long in the tooth to be taking charge of young dynamos such as Hudson. She, like the criminally little-seen Cusack, must surely have read a different script and envisaged a very different film from this.
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Lesley O’Toole