Pun Salad

This is a by-the-numbers romantic comedy, which means you almost certainly already know the broad structure of the plot: meet cute, relationship building, shattering crisis, tidy resolution. No surprising deviations here.

Fortunately the male half of the romance is Hugh Grant, who can make himself likeable and witty. (Drew Barrymore is the female, and she's been better elsewhere.) The situation has Hugh playing the less-successful half of a broken-up 80's pop duo, and that allows the movie to take some pretty funny pokes at musical culture past and present. ("Anybody see 'Battle of the 80's Has-Beens' last night? That Debbie Gibson can take a punch.")

One problem is that Hugh and Drew are supposed to instantly click as a powerhouse songwriting duo, like a reincarnation of Carole King and Gerry Goffin. But you really have to suspend disbelief that the song they're writing, and we're listening to, is anything other than dreck. Nobody's gonna confuse it with "Up on the Roof." And that makes the "artistic differences" crisis over the song later in the movie really tough to buy: who could possibly care?

So, overall: not great, not bad.