Kate & Leopold

Directed by James Mangold, Kate & Leopold follows 19th century inventor Leopold Mountbatten (Hugh Jackman) as he accidentally travels more than 100 years into the future – where he meets and falls for a contemporary career woman (Meg Ryan’s Kate McKay). Filmmaker Mangold, working from a script written with Steven Rogers, does a fantastic job of immediately luring the viewer into the erratic yet agreeable proceedings, as Kate & Leopold kicks off with an engrossing stretch detailing Jackman’s character’s exploits in the past and his initial discovery of Liev Schreiber’s time-traveler. (The movie’s heartiest laugh ultimately lies within this portion of the proceedings, as Schreiber’s Stuart giggles his way through a speech for the Brooklyn Bridge in which a civil engineer heaps praise upon his “glorious erection.”) From there, Kate & Leopold progresses into a hit-and-miss midsection that suffers from a distressing lack of fish-out-of-water silliness and an almost total lack of chemistry between stars Jackman and Ryan. (The picture does, however, benefit substantially from the actors’ charismatic work, as well as from the efforts of a solid supporting cast that includes Breckin Meyer and Bradley Whitford.) Mangold’s refusal to whittle the film down to an appropriate running time is ultimately its biggest problem, and yet, despite such deficiencies, Kate & Leopold boasts an affable atmosphere that does, in the end, compensate for its various faults – with the end result a good-enough romcom that could (and should) have been so much better.

**1/2 out of ****