Reviewed - The Perfect Catch: Fans of Nick Hornby's memoir, Fever Pitch, may feel the need to get all hoity toity about the Farrelly brothers' decision to change the hero's obsession from football to baseball in this underwhelming American reinvention.
But, to be fair, baseball inspires just the same level of supernatural devotion in its fans as the sport Arsenal play, and the Boston Red Sox's overdue triumph at last year's World Series - a result that necessitated reshoots - sounds like the perfect backdrop for a movie about sporting obsession. No, that part of the project is fine.
So is the casting of the perennially winning Drew Barrymore as the annoyed love interest. It's most everything else that sucks. The original concept of telling a life story in terms of parallel events in popular culture was clearly too complicated for a movie pitch, so, as happened with the only slightly less terrible 1997 British version, we have been handed a romantic comedy so nondescript that, 10 minutes after seeing it, you couldn't pick it out in a line-up.
Drew plays a top businessperson who falls in love with a Sox fan sometime after the close of the season. One gets the impression that the directors - that's the Farrellys, remember - are terrified of scaring off the female target audience by revealing what the film is actually about. Thus, the first 20 minutes are packed with all the things that chatty, date-friendly comedies must have these days. Women cluck at parties about men. Women cluck in the gym about men. Women cluck in restaurants about men. By the time the baseball season finally begins the other half of the target audience may have retired to the cinema next door for Stealth.
Those who remain will watch aghast as Drew focuses her ire on her chap's sports fixation. Let me get this straight. You are going out with whiney, bland, smug Jimmy Fallon - the latest charmless smart-arse to be spewed up from Saturday Night Live - and the only thing that's bothering you is his taste for the Sox. Get your priorities right, girl.
