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The Bachelor -- “Best Romantic Comedy of the Year”? Maybe in Utah, where a scene involving a crowd of brides and one groom is about as uncommon as glass-breaking squeals on a Mariah Carey album.
Chris O’Donnell, who ever since Batman & Robin probably wakes up in the middle of the night thinking, “I could have been Brendan Fraser,” plays a guy who has to get married (really married -- stay together for at least ten years, have a kid in five) within 24 hours or else he’ll not only forfeit the $100 million inheritance from his eccentric grandfather, but the family billiard-table business will get sold, costing over 200 people their jobs. Unfortunately he recently screwed up a halfhearted proposal to his true love (Rene Zellweger), so in desperation he works through seven former flames (this is based on a 1925 Buster Keaton comedy called Seven Chances), only to get shot down every time. Speaking of Carey, she has a brief cameo as one of the proposed-to, prompting the kind of murmur from the crowd you might expect if the Pope walked into Hooters. (She plays an opera singer, which is believable enough when you consider those hamster-in-a-blender shrieks are more appropriate to Puccini than pop.)
Little-known British director Gary Sinyor’s idea of comedy is to have everybody run around and shout a lot while flailing their arms. Worse, he squanders the talents not only of O’Donnell and Zellweger, but three of the most now-too-infrequently-seen, talented actors, comedic or otherwise, still working: Hal Holbrook, Ed Asner, and one of my all-time favorites, Peter Ustinov. Don’t bother. D+
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