Leap Year

Trans-Atlantic romantic comedies often reach for easy stereotypes, but few have managed to be as patronising as ‘Leap Year’, in which superficial Bostonian Anna (Amy Adams) totters over to Ireland for a love-hate relationship with beardy, muttering Irishman, Declan
(Matthew Goode).

The plot centres on the idea of a woman proposing on February 29 – an Old Irish Tradition, we are told 500 times, as if we’d never heard of it. Anxious for a rock on her finger, Anna flies to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott), who’s working in Dublin. Re-routed because of bad weather, she must squeeze her designer luggage into the banger driven by Declan, and question her heart when he turns out not to be a complete Neanderthal.

While there’s some chemistry between the pair, it’s not enough to compensate for their paper-thin characters, never mind all the crosseyed Guinness-swilling extras and the endless winding country roads that supposedly lead to Dublin. Adams does her level best, but her perkiness quickly wears as thin as her spiky heels on those pesky rural roads.