797. Picture Perfect (1997)

Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Bacon, Jay Mohr

Director: Glenn Gordon Caron

Running Time: 105 mins

Picture Perfect is an American film about a woman who, in an attempt to impress her boss, enlists the help of a man she just met to pretend to be engaged to her, however extreme complications arise when the plan doesn’t go quite as expected.

This is a painfully generic and unfunny rom-com. In terms of the comedy, there is barely any worth enjoying; I laughed once. In terms of the romance, there’s a whole lot more of that, and if you’re into a totally preposterous and idiotic story, then this is perfect for you, however for anyone else, this is just too soppy and unbelievable a romance to ever make you want to even try to be interested, making for extreme boredom and frustration while watching this movie.

There is one thing that actually rises above all of those problems, however, and that’s the characters. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the actors’ performances (although because it was so badly written a film they often did sound like they were phoning it in a bit), however every single character in this film is preposterously idiotic and deeply dislikeable.

From the start, everyone in this film have these really weird philosophies on life, all thinking that you should lie to others to get your own way, or that rather than work really hard to succeed, you just have to wait a long time, which just annoyed me beyond belief, and then, even when we have the supposedly ‘nice’ guy turn up, he’s as creepy as anyone, meaning that there was no-one who I wanted to support at all in this film, which is always a horribly boring experience.

Anyway, away from the characters, I also hated the story in this film. If you’ve seen Just Go With It, you’ll know exactly what the plot is here, because that’s just a carbon copy of this. However, Just Go With It was so stupid that it was almost acceptable to be a little unrealistic, and as a result it didn’t feel too preposterous a story, whereas this tries really really hard to be a genuinely emotional and heartbreaking romance (with failed attempts to throw comedy in every now and then), and that’s why the implausibility of its story really makes it fall flat on its face even worse.

So, overall, this gets a 4.3, due to every character being horrible as hell, a total lack of decent comedy and a ridiculously unbelievable plot that really annoyed me.