Runaway Bride

I made it through three-quarters of Runaway Bride before leaving. Suffering from acute toxic sweetness shock, my wife and I bolted out the exit door as though we were both shot out of a circus cannon to catch the mid-afternoon show of The Blair Witch Project at the other end of the theater. That film’s gritty reality proved to be a life saving antidote.

Runaway Bride will clean up at the box office, no doubt about that. Movie fans paying good money will line up to see the reunion of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere nine years after the enormously successful Pretty Woman. These two have the same screen appeal as Hepburn and Tracy did many years ago.

Too bad Roberts and Gere don’t have a worthy script to work with this time. Everything in this romantic comedy, from the story to the supporting actors, is so formulaic and contrived, it dulls the senses. When the name of the director, Garry Marshall, pops up in the credits, should we expect anything else?

Gere, acting like he belongs in one of those heartburn remedy commercials, plays Ike Graham, an op-ed page columnist for "USA Today." Ike writes a scathing story about a woman in Maryland named Maggie Carpenter (Roberts) who has left three different men standing at the altar. Ike’s source is a guy in a bar. Maggie writes a nasty letter to the editor (Rita Wilson), Ike’s ex-wife, who fires him.

I don’t know which offends me more: Having a nincompoop like Ike violate every rule of journalism ethics, or the shameless product placements of "USA Today." The same paper also pops up in Deep Blue Sea.

Ike travels to Hale, Maryland to meet Maggie. The town and its occupants are as real as a porcelain "Dickens Village" that is sold in department stores at Christmas time. They keep running into each other until romantic sparks begin to fly. The script conveniently calls for Maggie to ditch her latest fiance (Christopher Meloni), who seems like a pretty decent guy.

I refuse to believe that Roberts and Gere didn’t see through the contrivances of this phony-baloney film. Watch how they subject themselves to shameless camera mugging in scene after scene, and you’ll agree.