Hitch Review (Sunday Business Post)

Posted by on May 1, 2005 in Writing | No Comments

Hitch
Dir: Andy Tennant
Principle Cast: Will Smith, Eva Mendes, Kevin James

As if you didn’t know already, Will Smith’s new romantic comedy Hitch hits cinemas March 11th. It seems that there is always a Olympian amount of promotion behind anything Smith touches – so much so that it smacks of a guilty admission by the makers that the product itself isn’t up to much. Watch out for themed wallpapers, mugs, pencils, baseball caps, t-shirts and vibrators. Okay, maybe not the vibrators. One wonders if all this brouhaha is really necessary, wouldn’t he do pretty well at the box-office anyway? After all, it’s not as if anyone going to this film is expecting to see next year’s Academy award winning performances. Good thing too.
Alex ‘Hitch’ Hitchens (Smith) is a private relationship consultant with a 100% success rate. Passed on by client referral alone, he has reached the status of urban legend with his ability to give ordinary men the chance to rise above their caste and date desirable women. When Albert (Kevin James), a bumbling overweight bespectacled tax consultant asks for help to win the heart of Allegra Cole, a beautiful millionaire, he accepts the challenge as his greatest yet. But when Hitch starts to fall for Sara (Mendes), a cynical gossip columnist who’s tracking Cole’s every move, things start to get complicated.
The phrase chewing gum for the brain just won’t go away. Hitch is an off-the-shelf concept-driven studio flick that doesn’t warrant a director with any more than the pitiful Sweet Home Alabama and a handful of dodgy TV series on his resume. But that doesn’t make it terrible – just predictable. So long as you know you’re eating off the set menu, you’ll probably enjoy Hitch for what it is. One welcome surprise though, is that director Andy Tennant manages to reign in Smith’s equivalent of Mr Hyde, the cocky, smooth-talking peacock that was born in ‘Bel-Air’. But while Smith manages to charm without getting obnoxious, Mendes, partly due to her character, fails to garner the usual amount of empathy that the love interest usually does in these type of films. Unfortunately, stunning beauty doesn’t override the ambivalence we feel towards her, and you would be forgiven for thinking Hitch might be better off alone. Not what the writer intended, that’s for sure. The part of bumbling fool Albert is played amicably by Kevin James, but it seems that too often the moments with the most comic potential are not fully exploited. The scenes where Smith is coaching James for his dates get a smile but never really hit any high notes and you’d be in a good mood to laugh out loud more than twice from start to finish.
What is essentially wrong with Hitch though, is the fact that the philosophy of the film and the story are at such jarring odds with each other. While preaching love, it essentially reduces women down to nuts that are difficult to crack. While Hitch tells Albert that listening to women will make them notice you, we see him pull off an incredibly smooth and intricate series of circus tricks to get a date with Sara. Even the old adage of ‘just be yourself’ is even dispensed with – you need to be you, but with a bit more style. Having said all that, it’s only a bit of fun and if you liked Bridget Jones and My Best Friend’s Wedding, you won’t be disappointed. 3/5