Two Weeks Notice

If there were an Olympic sport for screwball comedy, I could think of no two finer representatives for their homelands than Two Weeks Notice's headliners. Bullock and Grant, U.S. and U.K., winning their heats with ease in the Pratfall, the Bodily Crisis, the Slurry Drunk, and the Hit-in-the-Head-Hard-With-Sumpun'-Funny. All those comedy standbys crop up in Two Weeks Notice, although, come to think of it, Bullock's the one falling down hammered and getting konked with a tennis ball. She's very good at it -- always has been. Grant, on the other hand, hardly breaks a sweat, which he is also very good at it. In the third of his recent string of caddish roles (preceded by Bridget Jones's Diary and About a Boy), Grant plays George Wade, a multimillionaire playboy and easy-on-the-eyes figurehead for the family-owned Wade Corporation. Through a roundabout turn of events, George hires Harvard-educated activist attorney Lucy Kelson (Bullock) to be his chief counsel. Liberal Lucy squirms at first at her new corporate job, but George promises her vast reserves of cash to funnel into her favorite charities, as well as the preservation of the threatened Staten Island Community Center, Lucy's childhood home-away-from-home slated for demolition to make way for a Wade skyrise. Lucy is good at her job, but George would rather she perform certain tasks not included in her job description: personal dresser, relationship expert, and best-friend-on-call 24 hours a day. Fed up, Lucy delivers her two weeks notice, which functions as something of a ticking matrimonial clock -- they've got 14 days to fall in love. Or rather, to admit to having already fallen in love, because quite obviously from the moment America's girl next door and Britain's foppish, formerly floppy-haired charmer lock eyes, it's only a matter of time before they start locking lips, too. The promise of that kiss -- the pleasing inevitability of it -- is the reason why audiences flock to romantic comedies, but it's not enough to sell this dog. Bullock and Grant are great, bringing everything they can to roles that are underwritten and borderline dull (watch their bodies instead of their mouths -- the sight of Grant sliding across a wooden floor in stockinged feet and Bullock stutter-stepping in a long, tight dress are worth more than nine-tenths of the dialogue). Writer/director Lawrence's script is a drag, full of stock characters and stock conventions, like the patented “secondary character spouting wisdom at a crucial juncture.” (So forgettable are the supporting players that I can't even remember who said what -- all I have to go on is a scribbled note to self: “great, another second banana epiphany” -- but you can be sure it was the kind of tried and true homily devised to give the leads a shove in each other's direction.) Lawrence previously penned Miss Congeniality and the underrated Forces of Nature for Bullock, but Two Weeks Notice has only a handful of the big laughs of those films. His latest moves like a figure-eight, winding about to give the illusion of going somewhere and accomplishing something, but ultimately ends right where it began. Lawrence's direction -- his first time at bat -- is equally uninspired. It's a botched job through and through, made all the more distressing by Bullock's recent announcement that she's throwing in the romantic comedy towel for a while. Say it ain't so, Sandy. There was so much promise, so little follow-through. Team Bullock and Grant deserve a second shot at the gold.