Movie Reviews: "The Proposal"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: The Proposal
19 June 2009 8:33 AM, PDT

It may be a good thing for The Proposal that movie audiences are composed -- overwhelmingly -- of the so-called “dating crowd.” Older moviegoers are likely to have seen the plot of the movie innumerable times in the past.

Besides, the movie itself is a so-called date flick.

Lou Lumenick in the New York Post calls it “shamelessly derivative, contrived and predictable.” Yet he adds that it is “nonetheless a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy.”

Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer similarly concludes “The setup is formula, but Bullock and Reynolds supply surprising fizz and kick.”

Likewise Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail comments that “the two stars invigorate this breezy trifle of a romantic comedy.”

And Tom Maurstad in the Dallas Morning News describes it as “the moviegoing equivalent of comfort food. You know exactly what you're getting and it's easy, no-fuss fun.”

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun Times says that as he watched the plot of the movie begin to unfold he sat “cringing, knowing with uncanny certainty where the story was going.” But by the end, he writes, he was won over.
“The Proposal recycles a plot that was already old when Tracy and Hepburn were trying it out,” he concludes. “You see it coming from a great distance away. As it draws closer, you don't duck out of the way, because it is so cheerfully done, you don't mind being hit by it.”

In her review in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis begins to describe the plot, then interrupts herself “You know the rest because you’ve seen (and read) it many times before,” she writes.
Dargis is not so congenial as Ebert in summing up the movie, particularly when it comes to Bullock “She's just another female movie star in need of a vehicle that won't throw her overboard for sexist giggles and laughs.”

Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal is somewhat kinder to Bullock but remarks that while he watched the movie, he couldn’t help thinking, “Why is she demeaning herself with such shoddy goods? She's a talented woman with a faithful following. She has made formula films of varying quality before, and her fans may well swallow this one, but it's a formula for disappointment laced with dismay.”

Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News also expresses something approaching sympathy for Reynolds, who has spent years “choosing scripts painfully beneath him,” she writes. “So it would have been nice if these two had found something worthy of their combined talents. Instead, their mutual inclination towards synthetic Hollywood junk just drags them down together.”

And Rafer Guzmán in Newsday simply dismisses The Proposal as a movie that “goes everywhere you’ve already been.”

-IMDB News