REVIEW: The Rebound

This is a great moment of self-referential acting by anonymous blond biker.

Romantic comedy is a phrase to strike fear in any movie goers heart in the last couple of years. Bride Wars, The Proposal, The Ugly Truth, Did You Hear About The Morgans, Leap Year, Valentine's Day, When In Rome and The Bounty Hunter but to name a few. It seems there's some endless studio conveyor belt pumping out one cynical, dead-eyed movie after another, all unfunny and somehow depressing in their endless and insincere gleefulness. For a genre essentially about how human beings relate to each other and without any kind of genuine humanity, films just lay down and die. And then we're forced to watch them decompose on screen, a never ending abyss of awkwardness, mawkishness and soullessness.

The Rebound is certainly no exception, and wonderfully takes on all those negatives and adds douchiness and self-satisfaction to the mix. Great. Catherine Zeta Jones picked a bizarre film to try to resuscitate her career with, which since her semi-ridiculous Oscar-win with Chicago has come to quite a severe intermission, thanks to a few bad choices and possibly some kids (I don't follow Us weekly as fervently as one might) she's found herself in the position where making a movie like this is viable, it raises her profile and blindsides the cinema going public for about 30 million or so but ultimately its a ninja decision, get in, get paid and get out. Or at least I hope it is. Jones floats through, fairly invisible in her own movie whilst co-star Justin Bartha, who frankly just seems happy to have a lead role in a movie, comes across quite badly. The most horrific thing about it though is the way the movie kind of congratulates itself as it goes along, believing its dull, self-righteous leads to be entirely trailblazing and leaning on some artificially cute kids how just make you re-evaluate your opinions on infanticide.

In its hypothetical defence, Leap Year set the bar so unbelievably low that The Rebound doesn't quite make you want to commit acts of annihilation in quite the same way. Instead it just leaves you painfully and thoroughly bored. Almost numbingly so, until the boredom somehow consumes you and all you can think about is that when Zeta Jones does her wide-eyed exasperation thing, she looks like Dory from Finding Nemo. This film sucks.

Rating: 3/10