'Til There Was You: Critic Reviews

The studio left this alleged romantic comedy sitting on the shelf for a year -- and it didn't improve with age.

Winnie Holzman's screenplay is uneven.

A fragmentary and amateurish fairy tale.

Here is the most tiresome and affected movie in many a moon, a 114-minute demonstration of the Idiot Plot, in which everything could be solved with a few well-chosen words that are never spoken.

With its clotted script, art direction that's all splash and no style, and dialogue that's too nakedly calculated to facilitate identification), this tedious and confused movie points several characters in obvious directions.

A tired piece of romantic cornball fare that harks back to a bygone era, the film is a badly conceived, poorly executed fairy tale guaranteed to make audiences squirm in their seats.

The payoff, such as it is, is distressingly anticlimactic, and results in frustration.

Tripplehorn and McDermott are likable enough in their roles, but Holzman's precious, overwritten script gives them few genuinely honest moments.

Bad romantic comedies with sappy characters aren't always without merit, since we cynics can at least use them to further our conviction that love isn't worth the trouble. But this bad romantic comedy is merely bad.

Graceless star Tripplehorn -- who's called upon to execute a painful series of pratfalls in a high-tech restaurant -- is not a natural comedian, and overall the movie is awkward and leaden.

The film's real irony is that Gwen and Nick are so annoying that they deserve each other.

The end credits couldn't have come any sooner

This is a fluffy, delightful romantic comedy in the same vein as Sleepless in Seattle.

It is so poorly executed that if you didn't know going in that these two were supposed to meet, you'd never figure out what the movie is about.

The fatal flaw comes with the casting of the romantic leads, and for once the problem isn't that they don't belong together. You're just not likely to care one way or the other.

pure plastic, flat and transparent. All involved were all too obviously aiming for another ``Sleepless In Seattle,'' but what they've produced is a cinematic siesta.

Tripplehorn and McDermott don't look as if they belong together and aren't strong enough actors to overcome their physical incompatibility. So there's no sense of urgency about them getting together.

When you combine the film's tedious length with questionable casting decisions (Parker disappoints, and Jennifer Aniston plays a surgeon(!?)) you get a fine mess that eventually redeems itself... just not all the way.

Even if they never met, nothing about this movie would be different except the last two or three minutes. Not exactly a ringing example of great writing or involving direction.