There is not necessarily anything glaring that I can point to that makes New in Town miss the mark.  It’s just completely uninteresting.  Even the worst comedies tend to generate at least some kind of reaction from the preview audience, but for the majority of this film there was a chilling silence throughout the auditorium.  It’s appropriate that one of the movie’s first gags is about tinnitus, because I have never been so aware of the constant ringing in my ear.

The plot is one they have been telling in Hollywood for years: a guy and a gal with seemingly nothing in common meet cute and develop an incredible dislike for one another… only to spend the rest of the movie falling madly in love.

In this case the gal is Lucy Hill, a city girl through and through who is on the rise in a Miami-based management company and accepts the task of restructuring a small plant in icy-cold Minnesota.  In a world where overalls and boots are not only recommended but essential, Lucy arrives in a skirt and heels to face the cold—literally—reality of her new home town.

The guy is Ted Mitchell, a man who seems to do just about every job the town requires of him.  He plows the roads, puts out the fires and is also the local Union representative: a title Lucy is unfortunately unaware of when she spends their first meeting insulting every aspect of his life.  Their relationship is increasingly strained as Lucy is determined to restructure the plant and leave any of its employees that she deems unnecessary out on their rear ends in the wake of her rise to vice president.

In a mediocre romantic comedy like this, however, all it takes for things to change is Lucy getting herself trapped inside her car that she drove into a snow bank and Ted coming to her rescue.  Of course, it helps that she has spent the entire time she’s been waiting downing a bottle of wine.  As if that wasn’t convenient enough, Ted also happens to be the single father who doesn’t know how to prepare his 13-year-old daughter for her first Valentine’s Day dance.  Enter Lucy to save the day.

Director Jonas Elmer and screenwriters Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox follow the formula for a successful romantic comedy down to every last inevitable plot twist, but what keeps New in Town from succeeding are the details.  It’s like reading the outline for a short story, rather than the story itself.  You get the idea, but there’s no substance.

The characters of Lucy and Ted are the prototypical romantic pairing, but as played by Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick, Jr., they don’t generate any identification from the audience.  We don’t really care if they end up together or not.  The romantic comedies that are truly delightful are the ones in which the audience is not just content with the fact that the leads will end up together, but is actually rooting for that to happen.  There’s no real chemistry between the two stars, either, and there are a couple of brief moments of awkward silences as if they didn’t know what to do with each other.

The script is also lacking in any real laughs, and the ones it has are few and far between.  In fact, for anyone who has seen the preview for this film, I would wager you’ve seen a good ninety percent of the film’s big laughs; and they are much more effective in the more tightly-edited trailer.

The bottom line is that New in Town is missing the two essential ingredients for a romantic comedy: romance and comedy.

New in Town is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.”  Seriously brief. I think I counted one taboo word. If felt the rating was appropriate more for some of the movie’s sexually suggestive content, but even that is very minimal.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of New in Town