The old proverb goes something like "you can't go home again". This applies because when paraphrased, you can't always recreate the magic of chemistry between characters when you reunite the actors who portrayed them. Particularly not when almost a decade has passed.

Richard Gere and Julia Roberts were perfectly matched in Pretty Woman. They are cast as the main love interests of Runaway Bride, both movies directed by Garry Marshall. But the pairing that worked so well in the tale of the rich man and the hooker with a heart of gold just doesn't work here.

It doesn't help the cause that the two are adversarial from the start. Gere is "Ike" Graham, a newspaper columnist who always manages to push the writing of his columns right up against deadline. When he takes the tale of a drunken man in a bar as the absolute truth, without bothering to verify any of his claims, and turns it into a misogynistic attack on a woman who leaves her grooms waiting at the altar, his troubles begin. The woman he wrote about is "Maggie" Carpenter and we get to see Julia Roberts' talent for displaying outrage when she reads Graham's column. She promptly fires off a response that gets Graham fired.

His response to losing his well-paying job is to journey to the town where Maggie loves them and leaves them at the altar, to gather evidence to prove his column was accurate, which will get him his job back, or maybe a better one. Of course the sparks fly between them, of course Maggie is engaged to someone else, and the town is speculating on whether or not she'll leave her latest fiance waiting at the altar. To say this is merely predictable is to give it too much credit.

Now I'm a sucker for romantic comedies. I like them even when they aren't great, and merely good. But I don't believe that this is up to even that modified standard. It has a few laughs, and the characters had the potential of being interesting. But aside from the fact that it was in theaters at the same time as Notting Hill, also starring Roberts and a much, much better movie, Runaway Bride left me wanting to run to the lobby and escape on more than one occasion.

I don't like being negative about movies. Particularly romantic comedies. I did laugh, but the laughs were too few and far between.