Review of The Romantics (2010) by Charles S — 14 Feb 2011

THE ROMANTICS is quite the disappointment of a movie. Judging from the talent in front of the camera for this one, including Anna Paquin, Katie Holmes, Candice Bergen, Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Elijah Wood, and Dianna Agron, one would have thought that this would be a movie that held a lot of promise.

The problem, however, is that THE ROMANTICS ends up being a character study about a group of, for the most part, uninteresting characters. The characters that do seem like they would be enjoyable to follow around for the film's duration are not given the amount of focus that they deserve (these characters being Malin Akerman's Tripler and Dianna Agron's Minnow). Had the film focused more on Akerman and Agron's characters, it could have at least squeezed much more fun out of the proceedings and made this film at least somewhat enjoyable on some level.

As this film is basically a character study, it doesn't really feel like there's much of a story being told here, and the one that is told isn't all that compelling and is something that we've seen countless times before. Hopefully, in the future, when filmmakers decide to put all-star casts like these together, they at least bother to give them something interesting to do, which is certainly not the case with THE ROMANTICS.