I’m Yours

Saddled with as idiotic a premise as one can easily recall, I’m Yours quickly establishes itself as an uncommonly interminable moviegoing experience that boasts little in the way of compelling or authentic attributes. The storyline follows New York-based investor Robert (Rossif Sutherland) as he drunkenly hooks up with Karine Vanasse’s Daphne one night and awakens to find himself en route to Canada in a car driven by Daphne. As it turns out, Daphne has essentially abducted Robert and is blackmailing him into meeting her parents and pretending that the two are a happy couple. It’s an unreasonably absurd setup that might have been okay within the context of a Sandra Bullock comedy but absolutely does not work in a straight-faced drama, with the quirkiness of both the premise and Vanasse’s character setting the viewer’s teeth on edge virtually from the get-go. (It doesn’t help, either, that Robert doesn’t ask why Daphne is doing this until somewhere around the one-hour mark, which is nothing short of ridiculous.) The movie’s pervasive absence of realism colors everything that follows, and there’s subsequently little doubt that the emotionally-charged moments that have been sprinkled into the narrative (eg Daphne tearfully reminisces about her past) fall completely and utterly flat. Filmmaker Leonard Farlinger’s frequently obnoxious visual choices (eg choppy slow motion, weird superimposed images, etc) exacerbate the movie’s already-underwhelming atmosphere, and it’s ultimately difficult to view I’m Yours as anything more than a consistently misbegotten piece of work.

* out of ****