Movie reviews: “Serendipity”

Several reviewers are faulting Serendipity, starring John Cusack and
Kate Beckinsale, for being just the opposite of what the title
implies — a happy accident. It is, writes Rick Groen in the Toronto
Globe & Mail, “an exercise in the contrived and the overcalculated.”
Similarly, Carrie Rickey observes in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Contrived and schematic, Peter Chelsom’s film is a mechanical bird that
never takes wing.” Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News comments
that he never felt 86 minutes go by so slowly: “Watching it, you have the
same feeling as children in school, anxious for the final bell, looking up
at the clock on the wall, only to watch the second hand move in reverse.”
But most critics suggest that the film amounts to some pleasant fluff at a
time when pleasant fluff is much needed. “The lightweight bauble is perfect
entertainment for now,” comments Jami Bernard in the New York Daily
News. “It’s spun-sugar silliness is such a relief,” Jane Sumner writes
in the Dallas Morning News. But Gary Thompson in the Philadelphia
Daily News begins his review of the movie this way: “They say romantic
comedies like Serendipity are what we can expect in times of crisis.
Another reason to pray for peace.”