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80The central idea is quite clever and appealing, and that the charm meter is turned up all the way.
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75Wonderful characters keep the movie from gagging on sweetness.
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75The movie-calendar equivalent of last July's "Six Days, Seven Nights," this star-powered romance overcomes a shaky start to outpace that passable confection by several runaway laps.
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70Once the premise had been established and the leads began to interact, I stopped totting up the inanities and had a good time.
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67But the movie's vital signs improve remarkably in the second half, and especially in the last act. The proceedings suddenly pick up some screwball charm, the writing improves (with several truly inspired one-liners tossed in here and there) and the secondary characters begin to click.
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63It's no Runaway success, but Gere and Roberts still glow.
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63A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.
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60More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.
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60Poky but often charming.
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58The difference between "Pretty Woman" and Runaway Bride is that we can no longer buy Roberts in her tearful romantic-melancholy mode. It seems vaguely patronizing now.
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50After seeing Gere and Roberts play much smarter people (even in romantic comedies), it is painful to see them dumbed down here. The screenplay is so sluggish, they're like Derby winners made to carry extra weight.
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50A shiny bauble full of dead weight, gloppy good feeling and airless cliches. And every time you try to grab onto "Bride's" characters, they run away. [30 July 1999]
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50The screenplay provides enough cute one-liners and love-struck speeches to give the comedy intermittent charm.
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50A clumsy motion picture that strives so hard for the perfect romantic ending that it triggers a gag reflex along the way.
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50Lack of chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts sinks this souffle.
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50It's all safe and sane and bland.
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50Fans of Gere and Roberts may not care about the movie's many implausibilities and other shortcomings because the stars do indeed sparkle like the bubbles in wedding champagne. But the rest of us will find the vintage too sweet.
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40Too bad their characters are comprised of nothing but the most hackneyed clichés and that it apparently never occurred to anyone to add even sketches of believable character development.
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40Runaway Bride isn't as offensive as most studio romantic comedies-just pointless and dull.
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40It doesn't generate enough laughs to make up for the fact that you never figure out what he (a misogynistic USA Today columnist played by Richard Gere) sees in her (a dizzy small-town hairdresser played by Roberts). Or, for that matter, what she could ever see in him.
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40Runaway Bride's Josann McGibbon & Sara Parriott script is so muddled and contrived, raising issues only to ignore them or throw them away, you wonder why so many people embraced it.
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40It's not just that the movie is formulaic; it's disingenuous. It relies on Roberts's smile to erase all misgivings. But all the stardust in the world can't disguise the fact that this is more package than picture.
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38Other than a few gratuitous montage sequences, plus a patently clumsy echo of the shopping scene in "Pretty Woman," Marshall refuses to pull his share of the load, forcing his beleaguered cast to fend for themselves.
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30I completely dreaded sitting through this movie...Two-hour purgatory.
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30You would never have predicted it from the breakout success of "Pretty Woman" nearly a decade ago, but it turns out that the pairing of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts has ripened over the years into something resembling month-old brie.
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30In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.
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30Comes off as nothing more than a PG-rated excuse to showcase Roberts in a variety of wedding gowns (five, by my count) and an exhausting number of comedy cliches.
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Marshall is the very definition of a hack; his one and only desire is to play to the lowest common denominator. This is the secret of his success: He aspires to mediocrity. With Runaway Bride, he has scored another bull's-eye.
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A runaway bore.
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20Maybe writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott were thinking of Tracy and Hepburn--assuming they were thinking of anything--but not even Roberts's smile can put this one over.
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10Another contrived, unconvincing romantic comedy that once again mixes stale sitcom humor with laughable attempts at pathos and emotional depth.
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10[Gere] seemed to be improvising his way from beginning to end, like he was disgusted with the actual script.
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0Atrocious bit of by-the-numbers screen filler. And anyone who easily lapses into sugar comas is advised to stay far, far away.
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Mixed: 1 out of 7
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