Hitch
, for all its emphasis on hooking up, remains unattached.
Where, in the apocryphal Book of Hollywood Wisdom, is it written that people who watch romantic comedies don't care whether the script is any good? That we find the idea of fat white guys dancing a priori hilarious? That as long as someone's wearing a wedding dress by the end, we'll leave the theater satisfied with our sugar buzz?
Hitch
subscribes to all of these redoubtable theories of moviemaking, though it's
***image1***
slightly more enjoyable than hitting yourself over the head with a bag of Skittles.
Will Smith (formerly a Man In Black and a Bad Boy) plays smooth-talking consultant Alex Hitchens. His mission: To advise wealthy but clueless guys how to attain the women of their dreams. Hitch aids hapless clients stricken with true love who don't know how to express it without causing the lady in question to do a one-eighty-for instance, Kevin James (
The King of Queens
), a hopelessly uncool accountant who's fallen for heiress Amber Valletta ("her last boyfriend owned Sweden"). But even this dire situation proves amendable under Hitch's tutelage, and despite his tendency to festoon his trousers with hot-dog mustard, James begins to win his beloved's heart. The only, as it were, hitch: the Date Doctor himself falls for a gossip columnist (Eva Mendes) whose sole aim is to dig up dirt on this new unlikeliest of couples. And Hitch's burgeoning affections act on him like kryptonite, leaving his suavity in the lurch as his attempts with her fail repeatedly.
While Smith has some unqualifiedly funny moments, you never really believe the love story-frankly, there's more sexual chemistry between him and Kevin James. And despite the script's weak attempt at snappy New York patter, we're subjected to floppy dialogue like "Life is not the amount of breaths you take"-hardly Howard Hawks
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(though of course, Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant never raced jet skis on the Hudson). From time to time,
Hitch
asks you to suspend disbelief, or more accurately, dangle it screaming above yawning abysses of reason (do newspaper editors ever indulgently insist their columnists take long vacations?). While Amber Valletta has an unexpectedly cute turn as the ditzy uptown girl, Mendes is, quite honestly, not very funny, though the camera occasionally catches tail-end glimpses of her trying to be. Finally,
Hitch
also makes the usual bad-romantic-comedy error of dragging on far too long. Why is it that one of the moments that drew the most laughs was Mendes eating whipped cream out of the can and watching the scene from
Jerry Maguire
in which a wet-faced Tom Cruise whimpers "You complete me"? Because for all its schlock, that film had memorable dialogue; one can almost guarantee that in years to come, no movie will ever feature a clip from
Hitch
.
