How Do You Know

Rating:*

Movie Review: How Do You KnowThree likeable stars and Jack Nicholson. Can you take this foursome and make a film that makes you want to barf the moment it opens? Yes,if the film is ‘How Do You Know’,which claims rom com status and gives us nothing but regurgitated lines,and puke-worthy situations.

Lisa ( Witherspoon) doesn’t make it to the softball team. So off she goes to find comfort in Matty’s ( Owen) rich baseball pitcher arms,which turns out,as we could have told her,to be an on-and-off thing. Because,see,Matty’s the kind of guy who thinks all female jocks are great in bed,and he’s even better,and whaddya know,you can find a jacket your size for the morning after,because he believes in being ready and keeping all sizes of jumpers and jackets and toothbrushes handy in his palace-sized bathroom. So of course there’s got to be the better bet hanging about. George ( Rudd) is the clean-cut businessman whose life’s a mess : his girl-friend’s dumped him because he’s facing a prison term for the sins of his father ( Nicholson),an outrageous,unashamed fraud. Yeah,that’s the guy for our girl,and she will discover this,kaboom and kapow,after two hours of unmitigated tedium.

These people speak to each other in dialogue that must have come out of an assembly line of scriptwriters under instruction to do ‘funny’,‘sentimental’,‘teary’. And Nicholson gets away with the worst ham act of his life. Whatever happened to James L Brooks ? This has to be As Bad As It Gets.

shubhragupta@expressindia.com