If the movie provides no new insight into the contrasting behavior of men and women or the perils of postmodern urban dating, falling well shy of the not-too-high standard set by Sex and the City on both fronts, it does have its tart, fizzy moments. It also has the usual montages set to mediocre pop songs, and its soft, lovey-dovey passages feel particularly lazy. Of course, you know where it will all end, and the last 20 minutes, during which all of the picture's comic effervescence dissipates, might have been compressed or dispensed with altogether.
After Andie and Ben perform a tuneless, furious duet of You're So Vain in front of a stunned and silent Marvin Hamlisch, there is a long, dreary stretch leading up to the obligatory boy-chases-girl-to-the-airport-as-she's-about-to-leave-town-forever sequence.
The chase gets as far as the middle of the Manhattan Bridge, and it is always nice when a movie set in New York appears to have actually been filmed here, rather than somewhere in Canada.
The neighborhood locations and tourist sights are well chosen, though the light in the earnest, kissy scenes appears to have been imported from Hawaii. Even the most golden-hued New Yorkers never quite achieve the honey-dipped dewiness that McConaughey and Hudson occasionally display.
But they're movie stars, of course, and this is a romantic fantasy of New York in which the advertising and magazine industries are untouched by any hint of recession, the Knicks are in the NBA finals and the Cinema Village, in reality one of the last holdouts of international avant-gardist film culture, is showing a chick flick marathon. This bit, which sets up an amusing fistfight between Ben and a sentimental giant, is a little piece of auto-homage on the part of the filmmakers. The marquee advertises Sleepless in Seattle(whose executive producer, Lynda Obst, also produced this movie), and Petrie's own Mystic Pizza.
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