This is yet the latest example of a film released theatrically that feels more like a television movie. In fact, it may be the best example so far this year. It is perhaps too generous to even say it is of the quality one would expect from a below average film premiering on the Hallmark channel.
The script could have been written in a day. The only aspect of it that surprised me was how ineptly written and clichéd it was. Michael Douglas's character is the stereotypical mean and nasty man who will thaw over the course of the film, revealing the decent person beneath. The device used to accomplish this is when he's forced by his estranged son to take care of a granddaughter he didn't even know he had. Father and son are estranged, you see, because the son is a former drug addict. Now he's going to jail, though his sentence has nothing to do with his past addictions, and he is actually innocent of the current charges. This conveniently allows for a subplot where Douglas manages to get his son released at the film's end, leading to a warm and fuzzy family reunion.
The film's plot quickly becomes an unguided missile. Douglas receives help with the granddaughter from Diane Keaton's character who lives in the apartment next door and has been putting up with his curmudgeonly ways for years. She is also working as a lounge singer and, in another plot thread, Douglas decides to act as her agent, finding her a better paying job at a classier establishment. As all this happens, they (big surprise) gradually start to realize that the other is not so bad after all. Cue the obligatory "romantic" part of the "romantic comedy" (though in this case I use both words very loosely). While all of this is going on, Douglas is also trying to sell a large house that he owns, but no longer lives in, as he prepares to move out of the area. Extra credit if you predicted that this is all an excuse for him to, when the time comes, decide to stay, realizing that he has come to love everyone else in the movie. Throw in scenes where Douglas tries to track down his granddaughter's mother, and one where he is forced to deliver a baby, and you'll have the jumbled mess that is this movie. I would say that jumping between all these disparate storylines made it difficult for any of them to build up momentum, but I don't think any of them would have been at all good on their own. Going back to the theme of it being like a television movie, it really seemed like all this jumping around was so that at any point one of the plot threads could reach a dramatic (again, using the term loosely) moment to lead into a commercial break.
If this film did air on television, I would have flipped past it without a second thought. The script itself is bad enough, but there also didn't seem to be much energy put into the filmmaking itself. It's a lifeless, disjointed, unchallenging mess.
D
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