I agree with my brother-in-law that this fish-out-of-water comedy starring Renee Zellweger is as contrived as they come, and add that it’s predictable and utterly unoriginal, essentially Doc Hollywood if you set it in Minnesota in the dead of winter.

Zellweger plays an upscale Miami businesswoman accustomed to jogging in the sunshine and driving convertibles who gets assigned by her company to oversee the restructuring of a manufacturing plant in a small blue-collar town smack in the middle of the aforementioned state.

The film follows its genre’s formula to the bland letter, with nary a variation. Zellweger hates the locals and vice versa but eventually warms up to them and falls for one (Harry Connick Jr.) and saves the factory from shutting down and yada yada yada. I’m not giving anything away here, as there’s absolutely no suspense. You’ll see every twist and turn coming from a mile away.

The you-betcha accents will probably remind you of Fargo, but Danish director Jonas Elmer neglects to create any real sense of place and so the characters here come off as merely caricatures to be mocked for their small-town mindset and sayings. Like calling big-city folk “munckees,” referring to P. Diddy as “Puff Diddly” or preferring country music over Fergie.

And Zellweger, a capable comic actress, seems lifeless here, either because she’s miscast, badly directed or simply not interested enough. It doesn’t help that she plays a personality instead of a character, and that the script not only fails to make her sufficiently cold at the outset but turns her nice too soon and too easily.

Add to that the fact that as a screen couple, she and Connick create absolutely no romantic sparks, mostly, I think, because Connick is a better singer than he is an actor. I mean, just watch him as he performs Christmas carols with the townsfolk. He seems positively giddy.

On a brighter note, the film does generate sporadic chuckles in its first 40 minutes or so, as Zellweger gets a high heel stuck in a grate, arrives at a neighbor’s dinner with her nipples showing through her sweater and is asked “Have you found Jesus?” and responds with “I didn’t know he was lost.” And the reliably funny J.K. Simmons (the dad in Juno) gets the film’s best line when he tells Zellweger, “That’s my ex-wife. This is my ex-house. Now I’m paying rent to live in my ex-basement.”

But I laughed consistently whenever Siobhan Fallon (the Lamaze coach with a lisp in Baby Mama) appeared as Zellweger’s secretary, a woman who likes to scrapbook, gossip, protect her Tapioca recipe and let Zellweger know over the intercom that she just rearranged her desk. For sure she absolutely nails the funny stuff, but when she confronts Zellweger at one point she shows she can do serious, too. – [DVD]

Comedy/Romance

Rated PG

DVD Release Date: 5/27/09

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