Bounce
dir. Don Roos
Miramax Films

A lot of people will love Bounce. Its stars are charming, its performances solid. And if there’s one thing director Don Roos proved with his directorial debut The Opposite of Sex, it’s that he knows how to shoot a great-looking movie.

But it’s all of little use when his story is so rife with cookie-cutter characters and dramatic cliches it might as well begin with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

For instance, Bounce begins on a dark and stormy night.

Ben Affleck plays Buddy, an uncaring, womanizing advertising executive who allows himself to be bounced from his flight so that he can have a one-night stand with a vixeny businesswoman.

But Buddy begins his journey down the path of epiphany when Greg (Tony Goldwyn), the stranger he gives his ticket to, dies when the plane crashes an hour after takeoff. In another lame plot contrivance, Buddy somehow knows the second the plane crashes, having only just met Goldwyn’s character a few hours earlier in an airport bar.

After the crash, Buddy holds himself responsible for Greg’s death and his tendency to drink (does every character whose life is on the wrong track have a drinking problem?) becomes worse, culminating in a stumbly rant during an awards ceremony where his agency wins an award for the damage control campaign it designed for the airline responsible for the crash of Greg’s plane.

A year or so after the crash, Buddy seeks out Abbie (Gwyneth Paltrow), Greg’s widow who’s trying to bounce back from her husband’s death. The recently sober Buddy hopes to do something to make things right and give the situation some closure. But there’s still over an hour of movie left at this point, so what else to do but have the two characters fall in love?

If the idea of a romance involving two folks brought together by an airline crash sounds a bit too similar to last year’s Harrison Ford dud, Random Hearts, well, it’s because it is.

Naturally, Buddy is dismayed at his straying from the original mission and he still doesn’t want to tell Abbie that their meeting wasn’t due to chance. He attempts to call the whole thing off, but is foiled by — in another lightning strike of originality — his quick-witted, quip-dispensing comic foil secretary, who — does lightning strike twice? — happens to be gay.

Eventually, the film stumbles into a fairly predictable will-he-tell-her-or-will-she-find-out-before-he-can seesaw whose resolution is all too predictable.

Every now and then, Bounce seems like it might rise out of the muck it’s buried in. When Abbie tells Buddy, “I’m widow-with-two-kids happy .... Grade on a curve, I’m happy,” it’s clever and charming. But for every line like that, there’s about ten like this piece of womanly wisdom:

“Guys screw up. It’s in their manual right after ‘Love your grill.’”

Ouch.

And that’s the problem with Bounce. It’s got a terrific director, solid actors, gorgeous camera work and even a brilliant title sequence and a not-unbearable light rock soundtrack. But you can’t bury a story or script this hackneyed under any amount of money or talent.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)