Fire with Fire review

Fire with Fire (15/R, 97 mins)
Director: David Barrett
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Josh Duhamel’s fireman enters the witness protection programme after seeing an Aryan crime boss (Vincent D’Onofrio) murder a shopkeeper in a gang related slaying. While waiting to testify, Duhamel is relocated to New Orleans where, eight months later, he’s involved with Rosario Dawson’s FBI agent, part of the team assigned to look after him, with the baddies on his tail all the while. Pedestrian in the extreme and dressed up with flashy gunplay, Fire with Fire is a sloppy excuse for a thriller, dimly plotted and thoroughly uninvolving, lacking any sense of momentum or excitement. It’s a miracle such a low-rent and borderline inept movie hasn’t crashed straight to DVD, but perhaps that can be attributed to Bruce Willis who, as the officer in charge of the case, has a minimal, rather pointless role at the head of an over-caffeinated cast doing shouty, unconvincing work.

Safe Haven review

Safe Haven (12A/PG-13, 115 mins)
Director: Lasse Hallström
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
 
The latest from the Nicholas Sparks production line stars Julianne Hough as a young woman, on the run for reasons unknown, who escapes on a bus and ends up in a small Carolina coastal town. Following the Sparks blueprint to the letter, we get the newcomer with a secret in a picturesque town, a love interest (Josh Duhamel’s hunky widower), golden photography and a late surge into melodrama. It’s a gentle romance populated by solid enough actors that neither raises the pulse nor truly annoys, but there’s only so many times we can swallow the same pudding. But what marks Safe Haven out from the bunch, and what could see it reinvent itself as a cult classic, is a late twist so risible that it leaves simply being bad far behind, and approaches jaw-dropping.

New Year’s Eve review

New Year’s Eve (12A/PG-13, 118 mins)
Director: Garry Marshall

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

An in-concept only follow up to Valentine’s Day, this hideous romantic comedy tracks what appears to be several thousand different characters on a New York New Year’s Eve, taking in births, deaths and marriages, with many of them orbiting Jon Bon Jovi’s rock star, due to play a gig at Times Square where most of them end up gathering. Returning players such as Jessica Biel and Ashton Kutcher take on entirely different characters from those in Valentine’s Day, while the likes of Robert De Niro, Halle Berry and Sarah Jessica Parker get roped into feeble situations constructed with the most flat and uninspired direction and acting imaginable. With an alarming dearth of laughs when it’s not being cloying and obvious, it soon progresses from just being bad to active incompetence, made with a complete lack of care and attention. The only remotely tolerable thread involves Zac Efron helping out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dowdy office worker, but they're forced too frequently to make way for the rest of a catastrophe that makes Valentine’s Day look like His Girl Friday.

Life As We Know It review

Life As We Know It (12A, 114 mins)
Director: Greg Berlanti
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

We’re on the rom-com trail once again, this time with Josh Duhamel and Katherine Heigl as our would-be romantic pairing whom we initially meet when they're set up on a disastrous blind date by mutual friends. This was some years earlier and they now treat each other as good natured antagonists who suddenly find themselves thrown together by a slightly tasteless twist of fate that sees their friends die and them named as joint guardians of their one year old baby. This means moving into their friends’ house, where they must contend with the usual nappy and feeding escapades that represent the movie at its most painful. It’s otherwise made palatable by more or less believable and likeable characters, with Duhamel as a sort of low rent Timothy Olyphant offering better value than he did in the atrocious When In Rome from earlier this year, while Heigl has been nowhere near this appealing since Knocked Up. But it can swing from tragic to kooky in the space of a scene, there’s never any doubt where it’s heading and it takes an awfully long time to get there.

When In Rome review

When In Rome (PG, 90 mins)
Director: Mark Steven Johnson
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

This stupefying fantasy rom-com stars Sarah Marshall herself, Kristen Bell, as Beth, a workaholic who goes to Italy for her sister’s wedding where she takes a shine to the groom’s best man (Josh Duhamel). She also takes some coins from the Fountain of Love, the legend telling that doing so means the person who threw it in will fall in love with you. As luck would have it, each of the coin owners lives in New York, and stalk Beth while she and Duhamel gambol through various misunderstandings. Sticking closely to the kind of moronic template that typifies the 21st century romantic comedy, this is remarkably dippy stuff that’s marginally less hateful than some examples of this doomed genre, but it’s still hard to care whether Beth gets the man of her dreams or drowns in the fountain.