535. Leap Year (2010)

Starring: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott

Director: Anand Tucker

Running Time: 100 mins

Leap Year is an American film about an uptight Boston woman who makes a trip to Ireland, where she plans to propose to her boyfriend on February 29, an old Irish tradition, however her trip takes a turn for the worse when her plane is diverted, and she only makes it to the countryside in South-West Ireland.

Well, well, well. Here’s another predictable, irritating and overly cheesy rom-com, and frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of them all. There are a fair few good jokes, and a solid central performance from Amy Adams, but on the whole, it’s no different to any other film of this type you’ve already seen.

But let’s start with the positives. At the beginning of the woman’s adventure across Ireland, there’s a good deal of chaos and idiocy around, with barely any romance whatsoever, and for the first ten minutes or so, when she’s completely out of her depth in this environment, it’s not too bad.

Throughout, one way of seeing this film in a positive light is simply by enjoying Amy Adams’ performance. Everybody else is at best average, but she makes her character fun and surprisingly not too annoying, and despite her very romantic philosophy, she’s good fun to watch.

However, the rest of this film is as formulaic and cheesy as you can get. I could compare this to a countless amount of rom-coms, but the plot summary is basically: stand in poo, go on amazing trip, see boyfriend, moment of realisation that person on trip was their ‘soulmate’ all along, go back, happy ending, done.

And although there are jokes interspaced throughout the story, it’s just so boring to watch the exact same thing for the millionth time; this film has no attempt at originality, and is just as irritating to watch as any other romantic comedy, so because of that, I’ll give this a 5.5.