Sweet Home Alabama

With its overlong running time and egregiously sluggish pace, Sweet Home Alabama comes off as a sporadically amusing yet entirely ineffective romantic comedy that ultimately squanders an expectedly charismatic turn from star Reese Witherspoon. The actress plays Melanie Smooter, an up-and-coming fashion designer who’s beside herself with excitement after her powerful boyfriend (Patrick Dempsey’s Andrew) proposes marriage. The euphoria is short lived, however, as Melanie is forced to return to her hometown of Pigeon Creek, Alabama, where she must confront the various faces of her past – including childhood sweetheart (and long-lost husband) Jake Perry (Josh Lucas). There’s little doubt that even the most forgiving viewer will find themselves rolling their eyes at Sweet Home Alabama‘s almost offensively simplistic modus operandi, as screenwriter C. Jay Cox offers up a storyline that couldn’t possibly be more contrived and hackneyed. As such, the film has been populated with a whole host of stereotypically colorful Southern characters that slowly-but-surely draw Witherspoon’s Melanie back into her roots – which, of course, paves the way for Melanie’s reconciliation with good ol’ boy Jake (admittedly, this particularly plot point might’ve worked better had Andrew been infused with at least one obnoxious personality trait). It consequently becomes increasingly difficult to care about Melanie’s self-invented plight, while the filmmakers’ unwillingness to offer up any other elements to hold the viewer’s interest assuredly sounds the movie’s death knell.

** out of ****

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