A LOT LIKE LOVE
Directed by Nigel Cole
Certificate 15

Ashton Kuchter and Amanda Peet

SAY you’re going to an Ashton Kutcher film and watch the sniggers. While the handsome young star of American TV’s ‘That 70s Show’ hasn’t had the big breakthrough romantic hit expected of him the star of the forgettable The Butterfly Effect, the underrated Just Married and the hilarious Dude, Where’s My Car at last finds an intelligent, subtle romantic comedy A Lot Like Love.
An American movie directed by a Brit, Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls, Saving Grace), this co-stars Amanda Peet as the women our hero falls for, beginning with an opening gambit that is a tad too convenient.
A young man sees a woman fall out with her boyfriend, finds that she is on the same flight as our hero and the two end up joining the mile-high club.
Give or take a few films here and there, this could be the first modern film to show just how awkward and difficult love really is in the world of careers, uncertainty, not knowing who you are and what makes you happy. The script, written by actor Colin Patrick Lynch, isn’t exactly a story. It is more of a linear timeline of what happens in the seven years between the couple meeting and their life progressing separately and together.
While Kutcher cutes his way through his awkward, earnest character, Peet is as dazzling and ditsy as her character requires. The pace bristles with haste as the period texture (it is surprising how much can change in seven years) keeps the audience clued up.
The script has shades of a better, believable, American version of After Sunset.
It’s a message movie too. As Kutcher’s character’s deaf brother says to him on a beach, after everything has gone wrong: “This is your life. It doesn’t wait for you to get back on your feet.”
For anyone, that’s a sentence to remember.