WHO MADE IT? | Director: Gary David Goldberg Cast: John Cusack, Diane Lane, Dermot Mulroney, Christopher Plummer, Stockard Channing, Elizabeth Perkins | WHAT'S IT LIKE? | Teacher Sarah (Lane) and boat-builder Jake (Cusack) are both newly single. Without permission, their interfering friends and family set them up with each other through a dating website. Their first date is strained and things are further complicated when she falls for the charming father of a pupil (Mulroney). Torn between two possible lovers, will fate help Sarah make the right choice? | WHAT'S IT LIKE? | This is a real mixed bag. It has as much going for it - in terms of originality and wit - as against it - in terms of predictability and corniness. Unusually for a bog-standard rom-com, it tantalises with the possibility of two suitable suitors, but chickens out, by turning one of them into a creep, out of the blue. Cusack's reliable charm elicits some unexpected belly laughs, but the film bursts with predictable sentimentality. Regrettably, among the rom-com cliches, it features a cutesy song-and-dance number, round the dinner table, just half an hour in. Creatively, it ends on a low, with an incongruous and irrelevant "race-against-the-clock" denouement, which undoes any good work that's preceded it. If you like warm, traditional, safe and amiably cute romantic humour, it's a harmless enough way to spend an hour and a half, but if you prefer a sharper, more refined approach to your comedy, you'd get more satisfaction from walking your dog. | Opens 16 September 2005
