Picture Perfect

Directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, Picture Perfect follows Jennifer Aniston’s Kate as she invents a relationship with an affable wedding videographer (Jay Mohr’s Nick) to placate her bosses and move up the ladder at work. It’s a by-the-numbers yet workable premise that’s employed to consistently underwhelming effect by Caron, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Arleen Sorkin and Paul Slansky, delivers a sluggishly-paced and pervasively generic romantic comedy that contains few interesting or compelling elements – with the picture’s far-from-engrossing atmosphere compounded by a total lack of chemistry between Aniston and Mohr’s respective characters. There’s little doubt, as well, that Picture Perfect suffers from a meandering midsection that contains little in the way of compelling, attention-grabbing moments, and it’s clear, too, that the almost total lack of laughs, even within the big comedic set-pieces, goes a long way towards perpetuating the distressingly lifeless feel. The third act’s expected emphasis on Kate and Nick’s fake break-up fares even more poorly than one might’ve anticipated, which ensures that Picture Perfect ultimately concludes on as anti-climactic and forgettable a note as one could possibly envision – thus cementing the film’s place as a competently-made romcom that is, for the most part, the cinematic equivalent of elevator music.

** out of ****

Leave a comment