Can’t Buy Me Love

Directed by Steve Rash, Can’t Buy Me Love follows Patrick Dempsey’s dorky Ronald Miller as he gives his high school’s most popular girl (Amanda Peterson’s Cindy) $1000 to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month. It’s an appealingly familiar setup that’s employed to hit-and-miss effect by Rash, as the filmmaker, working from a script by Michael Swerdlick, delivers a mostly watchable comedy that benefits substantially from the affable work of its two stars – with Dempsey and Peterson offering up charismatic work that’s heightened by their palpable chemistry together. And although the picture’s been suffused with a number of entertaining sequences and scenarios in its first half, including a genuinely romantic interlude set at an airplane graveyard, Can’t Buy Me Love eventually (and perhaps inevitably) progresses into a repetitive, egregiously predictable third act that slowly-but-surely drains one’s interest and enthusiasm. (It is, for example, difficult to find much value in the growing emphasis on Ronald’s fractured relationships with, initially, his old friends and, eventually, his new ones.) The movie admittedly recovers for an uplifting and satisfying final stretch that ensures the whole thing ends on a positive note, which does, in the end, cement Can’t Buy Me Love‘s place as an erratic yet passable 1980s romantic comedy.

**1/2 out of ****