Darby O’Gill lives again

At The Movies

Leap Year
DIRECTED BY: Anand Tucke
STARRING: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, Adam Scott, John Lithgow
CERT: PG
SURE you have to laugh. Leap Year is so far beyond stupid, you really can’t help yourself. Once you get past that, you might even find that a few of those laughs are genuine – and that the film actually has a certain charm. It’s just not the kind of charm its deluded creators think it has.

Anna Brady (Adams) is a go-getter from Boston – the driven, type-A, control freak whose life is as perfectly ordered as the apartments she dolls up for a living. All that’s missing is an engagement ring from her surgeon boyfriend Jeremy (Scott), who’s just disappointed her again before jetting off to Dublin for a medical conference.
When she learns from her father (John Lithgow) of an old Irish tradition that a woman can propose to her man on February 29, when it comes round in a leap year, she jumps on a plane and follows her beau to Ireland.
But then the fates start messing with her perfect plan. Her flight diverts to Wales and bad weather keeps the ferry at port. Though it doesn’t stop the fisherman giving her a lift in his little boat, all the way to Dingle on the far side of Ireland, as any sane man of the sea would in a raging storm.
She settles down in a local pub for the night where she gets acquainted with the gas ’ould characters who hold up the bar and with rugged barman Declan (Goode), who also keeps busy as the town hotelier, chef and taxi driver. Plugging in her mobile phone to charge, she puts out the power in the whole village. Sure you know how it is.
For a large fee, Declan agrees to drive her to Dublin in his taxi – a smashing little Renault 4, the vehicle of choice for all self-respecting young Irishmen, especially since the introduction of the NCT.
Along the way, they experience the usual Irish road trip adventures – rain, mud, cow dung, missed trains of a Sunday, amorous European tourists and a tiny shared bed in a B&B run by a bug-eyed station master in Tipperary. And sure you couldn’t travel the country without crashing an Irish wedding, doing a jig and putting the bride’s eye out with your shoe.
And of course they’re fighting like cats and dogs all the way. But by the time our feisty little redhead reaches her destination, just in time to pop the question, isn’t she after getting a bit fond of the scruffy, grumpy Irish fella all the same?
You know she is. As surely as you know that, for conceiving this kind of drivel and bringing it into the world, writers Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont and director Anand Tucker should be taken away immediately by the Stupid Police.
Still and all, it does have its moments – and no film with the lovely and ferociously gifted Amy Adams is a complete waste of space. She can’t save this nonsense but she gives it plenty of welly and it’s fun to watch her and English actor Matthew Goode knock sparks off each other.
He’s in good form too, even if he was embarrassed to be on board. It’s not often you’ll hear an actor admit that his new movie is rubbish, as Goode did last week. It was refreshing, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for his Hollywood counterparts to start doing the same.

Extraordinary Measures
DIRECTED BY: Tom Vaughan
STARRING: Brendan
Fraser, Harrison Ford,
Keri Russell
CERT: PG
EXTRAORDINARY Measures is not much more worthy than your average bog standard disease-of-the-week drama and would have gone as largely unnoticed as the rest if not for its big name cast.
John Crowley (Fraser) and his wife Aileen (Russell) have three children, two of whom suffer from Pompe disease, a rare condition which kills most patients by the time they’re nine years old – the age of Crowley’s daughter Meghan (Meredith Droeger).
Desperate to find a cure, Crowley turns to scientist Dr Robert Stonehill (Ford), a bit of a maverick who’s been working for years to find a way to artificially produce the crucial enzyme that Pompe patients lack.
He believes he’s hit upon a way to do it, but needs the Crowleys’ help to raise half a million quid to make it happen.
And so it’s a race against time – and against Stonehill’s old foes in the medical bureaucracy – to save the kids.
Which doesn’t involve much original thought on anyone’s part here – or anything new from Ford or Fraser in the acting department – but certainly involves plenty of tears and tissues in the audience by the time the end credits roll.
You know the routine.