Leap Year

Directed by Anand Tucker

(PG)

*

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A woman travels to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Leap Year, said Jason Heck in The Kansas City Star. Anand Tucker’s film just happens to be an extremely lazy excuse for a romantic comedy. Amy Adams’ Anna travels to Dublin to propose to her boyfriend on Feb. 29 of a leap year—when, according to an old Irish tradition, women are allowed to propose to their men. After a series of calamities that can “only be described as ‘plot driven,’” the “creakily obvious” story line lands her in the lap of another man, Matthew Goode’s handsome yet rough-hewn bartender, Declan. They hate each other, then they don’t, and “there you have it: another rom-com without any rom or com,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. The actors try their hardest to humanize a script that “puts the ‘ick’ in ‘formulaic,’” but this is a romantic comedy that “makes you weep for the genre.” There’s not a surprising moment to be found, said Nathan Rabin in The Onion. Leap Year is the “cinematic equivalent of a Shamrock Shake”: artificial, overly sweet, and “about as authentically Gaelic as an Irish Spring commercial.”