.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Horrible. Absolutely horrible.

It's rare that I would start a review with the tipping of my final opinion. After all, why else, why would you read the next 400 words if you knew exactly my opinion?

But my recent experience with Leap Year, was so awful, so terrible that I need to make sure the message is forwarded immediately and without being hidden amongst a description of the plot of the characters that the status reviews force me to divulge.

Leap Year stars Amy Adams - you know, the talented Amy Adams that has been in Doubt, Julie & Julia and Ella Enchanted - as Anna, a successful and rather well-off Bostonian that attempts to travel to Dublin, Ireland to propose to her fiancée on February 29th of a leap year.

Her motivation comes from two sources. First, her fiancée Jeremy (Adam Scott) seems reluctant to make the move himself. Secondly, it would seem it is some kind of family or Irish Tradition that is described in detail in a very forced dialogue scene by father Anna's father played by John Lithgow.

But while on her journey to the Emerald Isle, Anna encounters the usual sitcom-ish type obstacles that impede her from accomplishing her mission.

The first of many un-inspired events comes when her plane has an emergency landing in Wales. A few stupid and unfunny situations removed from the landing, Anna meets bar/restaurant owner Declan (Matthew Goode), a crass and unshaven Irishman who through all of his disdain, agrees to take Anna to Dublin for a fee that will cover some unexplained debt he has back at the bar.

The two then travel for two days through rain, hail and more rain towards the goal of reuniting Anna with Jeremy. Encountering unmovable cows, a car that ends up in a creek, an inn with a room that only has one double bed and a bevy of predictable, uninteresting and boorish moments, Anna and Declan survive their element and situations until Dublin is in their sights.

Directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl), Leap Year is sloppy, stupid and maybe the most unromantic movie of the past ten years.

As critics, we write frequently about two lead characters not having chemistry together, but never have I encountered two characters that registered so little sparks that the predictable final chapter is all that more preposterous. Adams and Goode have been more than competent in previous ventures, but in Leap Year, they sleep walk through a terrible script and a resulting awful movie.

By the end, when Anna utters "Put it on my bill" while in Declan's embrace atop an Irish cliff, I couldn't help but want to utter the same. Why can't I put my ticket costs on someone else's bill for having to sit through what is the first film I saw released in 2010 and will clearly be on my Worst of 2010 list twelve months from now.