A lot of thoughts ran through my mind as I watched Leap Year; “I wonder how far the contractors have gotten on remodeling our kitchen”, “I need to remember to shave my head tomorrow”, “Shit, I’m outta doughnuts!”, “This movie isn’t over yet?!?” To say the film was tedious would be a compliment (and surprising, given its scant 90-minute runtime). In the tradition of romantic comedies involving women who start out as neurotic control freaks, only to be forced out of their comfort zones to find true love with scruffy, laidback men, Leap Year doesn’t miss a beat, playing every possible cliché of the genre note for excruciating note. In the film, upscale apartment stager Anna (Amy Adams) can’t get over that fact that her boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott) has yet to propose marriage, having been together the last four years. It’s an understandable frustration that ultimately leads Anna to take the advice of her father to follow Jeremy to a medical conference he’s attending in Dublin, Ireland. Apparently there’s a tradition in Ireland that a woman can propose to a man on February 29th of a Leap Year, and Anna is at her wits’ end. Facing every hurdle imaginable just to get to Ireland, she’s forced to enlist the aid of a rough and rugged innkeeper named Declan (Matthew Goode) to take her the rest of the way, resulting in a series of misadventures that forces them towards an inevitable mutual attraction.

Getting past a concept that paints Anna with a large brushstroke of crazed desperation, one of the film’s many problems is that it repeatedly betrays the few bright ideas it has. It’s great that there’s some effort, late in the second act, to humanize Anna with a backstory of struggle and perseverance in response to having to deal with an irresponsible father, but it’s not terribly believable when everything preceding this presents Anna as cartoonishly prissy and naïve of the non-upper class world, utterly incapable of dealing with even the most trivial of obstacles on her quest (her attempt to plug in the charger for her Blackberry results in the destruction of a hotel room, and knocking out the power across an entire village). This leaves one to wonder why she would even listen to her father about the Leap Year proposal anyway, given her unresolved issues with him. Furthermore, the film’s supporting cast is beyond weak. The best romantic comedies are the ones that don’t rely solely on its two leads to carry the entire film, but there’s so much wasted potential to be found in Leap Year. John Lithgow’s time on-screen is all too brief as Anna’s father, and aside from a few charming anecdotes, the Irish town folk Anna and Declan encounter on their travels are just kind of . . . there. Making use of a few recognizable English/Irish comedic actors would have helped immensely. Especially considering how woefully unfunny the film is in general. You can thank Murphy’s Law for that, as everything that can possibly go wrong does, and we can see it all coming a mile away; an encounter with a herd of cows predictably results in Anna stepping in a pile of said animals’ feces, whilst wearing impractical, ridiculously expensive shoes. Rather than sit on a bench for over two hours while waiting for a train to Dublin, Anna and Declan trek up a nearby hill to visit a castle. How much you want to bet they lose track of time and miss the train?! (hint: It’s such a sure bet, you could wager your first born child) Prudish innkeepers force the pair to pretend they’re married, and the room ONLY HAS ONE BED!!!

It’s amazing how often Leap Year takes the few things it comes close to doing right, only to backslide into a mud puddle of mediocrity time and time again. Amy Adams and Matthew Goode have a fair amount of chemistry, but they spend most of the film trudging though a story on auto-pilot, almost completely devoid of wit or genuine heart, and honestly a bit insulting.

Final Verdict: D+