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With its broad characterizations and sweeping generalities, "Runaway Bride" is obviously meant as a fairy tale. Roberts lives in a perfect little town of apple-cheeked triplets and serenading barber shop quartets (no, really) -- a town that looks less like an idyllic outpost of Americana than the gift shop pavilions on Disneyland's Main Street USA. And Gere's Manhattan is a city where unemployed journalists live in huge apartments with private decks (even when they kvetch about not having a fax machine) and banter about getting their creative "jooces flowin'."

Such lack of realism isn't a crime, especially in comedy. But Marshall's world is so zealously cute, so condescendingly trite, there's never any room for the tension and sparks necessary to make the movie work. When Gere and Roberts confront each other about their mutual moral cowardice, their dialogue has the canned perfunctoriness that signals the beginning of the "Why, you really do care!" portion of the film. Everything about them, from their courtship to their character quirks, feels written in shorthand rather than thought out. It's as if the filmmakers figured casting the movie was enough -- why bother actually writing it?

For their part, Gere and Roberts both try to hang on to their dignity -- he shrugs and squints and looks vaguely pissed-off most of the time, she swings her long, I-am-in-a-movie-that-will-make-money hair and turns on her America's Sweetheart smile. Ten years into her career, Roberts has managed to retain her coltish energy, but it's tempered now with the beginnings of mature grace. That finesse, however, just makes seeing her forced to flirt so furiously and utter such impossibly bad dialogue all the more excruciating.

Considering the fact that we haven't had an adult romantic comedy this year since, oh, the last Julia Roberts romantic comedy, there's every chance in the world that "Runaway Bride" will make great big piles of money at the box office. That might not be such an awful thing if it didn't suggest the strong possibility of more semi-sequels from Marshall and company. And the chance of any of us ever seeing a real, grown up romantic comedy again seems even less likely. Why should filmmakers bother making intelligent and witty romantic comedies when you can just as easily put two big names on the marquee?
salon.com | July 30, 1999

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