Hey, here’s a surprise, Laws of Attraction is about two divorce lawyers who wind up married. Why? Because irony makes me giggle and squee. Want to take a guess what else happens because they’re, ya know, both married lawyers? Yep, they take a case that puts them against each other. And you know what else happens? Yep, the marriage gets in the way and causes disorder in the court. From the moment you start this movie, you can sense where it’s going from a mile away. What you don’t expect is that the romantic aspect of it doesn’t start ‘til about a mile away either. It’s like they started filming a really good lawyer comedy and realized “oh shit, it’s a romantic comedy too” and someone said “well, it’s too late for that now” which was responded with “nah, it’s never too late to shove a romance into a movie, we’ll just get them drunk first and call it an accident” and from then on this is about as predictable as “The Toilet Crusade” after a plate of bean burritos.
It sucks that I have to grade this as a romantic comedy because as a regular comedy, if they just didn’t try the whole drunken marriage thing, this actually was a very smart, well thought out story with two lawyers (Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore) who have very different litigation styles launching a hilarious barrage of verbal jabs at each other. But then they got all sappy and because Pierce Brosnan is required by Hollywood law to fall in love with any co-star with boobs (Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire doesn’t count), the last half of this movie just felt like it was being force-fed to us without any real explanation of why we should feel this relationship had a chance. It was basically an unromantic bowl of Apple Jacks: “why do you love me?” “Uhhh…I just do.” “Ok, well that’s earned another 10 minutes of movie time without me questioning it again.” Laws was doing so well at being intelligent, too. Sigh…
Now, this film didn’t actually break my rule of rom-coms as the first half of the movie had so much sweet, funny chemistry between the two that WASN’T trying to be romantic, switching that over to a romantic tone actually seemed like it’d be really easy and for that, I can believe that the two could carry their relationship into the future well. Of course, during the movie, it was too damn afraid to try it out a little bit because they just decided to get plastered and get married instead and focus on “so ummm…do we want to do something about this or…what?”
So, with that being said, I give Laws of Attraction a 7 dustbusters out of 10 and the only reason for that is because of the mish-mash of movie types. The romantic storyline…sucked. The everything else…awesome. Loved it, just what I would have wanted out of a romantic comedy if they eased the romance in there instead of said “it’s funny ‘cause they’re DIVORCE lawyers! Har har har!” Bleh, oh well. Can’t when them all I guess, though is a solid score for a rom-com. Really though, honestly though, this would have easily hit 8 or 9 of it just ignored that part all together.
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