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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Richard Gere and Julia Roberts pair-up for a would-be "Pretty Woman" Part 2, but the thrill is long gone.
Jul 30, 1999 | Some things, like a perfect bottle of scotch, improve with time. Other things, however, just start to smell bad. You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.
If "Runaway Bride" fails to replicate the Cinderella hooker story, it's not for lack of trying. It has the same director, the same stars playing the same basic characters (he's jaded and cynical! she's damaged but quirky!) and even a few strikingly familiar scenes. How can anyone who's seen "Pretty Woman" not get a shudder of déjà vu watching Gere and Roberts engage in a rapid fire financial negotiation that culminates in Gere's triumphant "Done!" or seeing an unhelpful shopkeeper treat our poor would-be customer Julia so shabbily? Hell, there's even a Roxette song on the soundtrack, an inclusion that leaves the viewer wondering when the strains of Go West might crop up next.
The basic premise concerns Ike Graham (Gere), a gruff he-man columnist for USA Today, who hears about notorious groom-jilter Maggie Carpenter (Roberts) and turns her into the basis of one of his diatribes against the fair sex. Ike's clearly a graduate of the Mike Barnicle Famous Writer's School, because he tosses off his screed without checking any of the facts, a move that enrages his subject and costs him his job. Bent on revenge and career redemption, he goes in search of the real story on the runaway bride, who happens to be mere days away from her fourth attempt at making it all the way down the aisle. Ike shows up in her quaint Maryland town and starts poking around, and the two take a strong dislike to each other. Then they fall in love, naturally.
The notion of an arrogant tough guy meeting his match in a commitment-phobic woman isn't such a bad one. Unfortunately it's the only thing about the movie that doesn't seem completely ill-advised. Director Garry Marshall and writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott never seem satisfied with their material or their cast, so they compensate with a frantic heap of limping gags and improbable situations. (Sexist Gere is seen repeatedly being smacked by irate women brandishing his newspaper columns, in what appears to be the Marshall equivalent of a kick-in-the-nuts joke.) Roberts and Gere try gamely to look at each other as if there's a scintilla of frisson between them, but often as not they're forced to eschew the drama and go for absurd overacting -- she screwing up her face in a platypus imitation, he bounding clumsily through a snake-filled cow field.
