Review of A Lot Like Love (2005) by Manny C — 13 Apr 2011

I like Amanda Peet, Ashton Kutcher....not so much.Here we get seven years worth of them. That's what crammed into two hours of A Lot Like Love, which is blatantly a lot like other rom-coms, notably the good ones like When Harry Met Sally, even though it seems like it wants to aim for the something more.

Director Nigel Cole (Calender Girls) amazingly helms the whole thing without a tinge of personality. The movie, from a script by Colin Patrick Lynch, shifts back and forth through time, starting seven years earlier whe Oliver (Kutcher) and Emily (Peet) meet on a plane from L.A. to New York, where she lures him into the bathroom for a quickie. He ends up wanting more. 'Don't ruin it,' she says. And so she leaves him to get with a bunch of losers who end up dumping her until she ends up with one (Jeremy Sisto) that she gets to dump herself. Meanwhile, Oliver focuses on building his dot-com diaper business, and ends up getting dumped by only one woman. In between affairs the two meet up to vent, and sometimes get into some hanky panky, like when they spend a night in the desert and Emily, now a photographer, snaps a shot of them standing on a rock in the nude. The film gradually shifts from years to only months, until it reaches its inevitable, predictable conclusion.