This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Each year, there is a film that arrives like a thunderclap, ushering in a new cinematic era. Leap Year is that film. The era that is ending is the rich and rewarding season of holiday films that start roughly at the end of October and continue through Christmas. The era just beginning spans the months of January through April, and within it exists a cinematic black hole so powerful that almost nothing of quality can escape its ravenous appetite.

Amy Adams plays Anna, an uptight, OCD real estater who has been dating Jeremy (Adam Scott) for four years and expects him to pop the question any day now. When that doesn’t happen, Anna decides to take matters into her own hands. Taking advantage of an old Irish tradition that allows women to propose to their boyfriends on Leap Day, Anna clandestinely follows Jeremy to Dublin where he is attending a medical convention, intent on snagging him once and for all.

However, Murphy’s Law (O’Murphy?) is in full effect. Bad weather forces Anna’s plane to land hours away from her intended destination. Stuck in a tiny village, Anna enlists the help of the good-looking but churlish Declan (Matthew Goode, a Brit who never quite gets his tongue around the Irish brogue) to drive her across the country. Though neither can stand the sight of the other at first, the road on which they travel just may lead to more places than Dublin.

Leap Year is an exceptionally bad movie with exceptionally great stars. It is impossible not to love Adams. Much the same for Goode. But what they are doing in this film is anybody’s guess. The same goes for the film’s director, Anand Tucker. Tucker, who also helmed Shopgirl and When Did You Last See Your Father?, is a far better director than this. While he doesn’t have a vast reservoir of films to show for his young career, his films to this point have been smart, even momentarily inspired. That he would lower himself to make a film like Leap Year is simply baffling. The ladder of success is often runged with embarrassing, compulsory assignments.

Tucker’s participation also explains a great many things. Used to making slow, measured dramadies, he has no comprehension of how to pace a straightforward comedy, especially one that comes with the baggage of several absurdly preposterous and juvenile moments. As such, Leap Year moves like molasses, with scenes stretched far beyond the timing necessary to delineate punch lines. Tucker complicates matters by pretending Leap Year is more significant than it is, ending scenes with slow fades, and partnering with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel to shoot the film and the beautiful Irish countryside far prettier than it deserves.

The plot of Leap Year, which traffics in broad stereotypes and imagines a romanticized rural Ireland straight out of The Quiet Man without even basic utilities, is a relic taken from the vault and dusted off after a 50 year or longer hibernation, when a woman proposing to a man would have seemed, if not scandalous, at least forward. But this is 2010, and you’d think at least one character would have reminded Adams’ Anna of that fact. Then again, Leap Year is the sort of film that borrows everything of substance but produces nothing that remotely matters.

Hey Leap Year, New in Town, The Proposal, The Ugly Truth and a dozen other (equally guilty) movies called. They want their scenes back.

Cast: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
Director: Anand Tucker
Rated PG for sensuality and language.
Running Time: 97 min.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.