Drew Turney
This movie comes from the tried and true rom-com subgenre where the pair who can’t stand each other but are destined to fall in love. It’s enjoyable only for its watchable leads and a tone that’s more grown up than most movies about love and sex manage.
Miles Teller is set to explode thanks to the rave reviews Toronto favourite Whiplash is getting, but this is his more traditional territory as comic romantic foil Alec.
Analeigh Tipton – the ‘I know her’ girl from ”Warm Bodies” and ”Crazy Stupid Love” – is Megan, a thoroughly modern creation straight from the Girls playbook, a twentysomething chick who can’t get her life together and lounges around a poky New York apartment with a Mac laptop and an iPhone.
Despairing at her lot and wanting to prove she can still do something spontaneous and sexy, she signs up to a dating website and tells herself she’s going to pick a guy from the responses and go and sleep with him.
Alec is the lucky guy, and after their one night together things go sour and she hightails it out of his apartment, the pair throwing barbs at each other during the exit.
But this is a romantic comedy about opposites attracting, so the movie gods have sent a blizzard into New York and snow has barricaded the building closed, giving Megan no choice but to go back upstairs and sit in wait for it to be over with a guy she already thinks she can’t stand.
If you’ve watched a movie in the last half century you already know where it’s going, but with another hour left of the film director Max Nichols can take his time about it, giving Megan and Alec some interesting and at times sweet side roads to go down.
Katherine Heigl and her cutesy sweet rom-com tone are nowhere to be found. There’s swearing and sex talk aplenty, which raises the rating along with the interest level, and even though both characters fall victim to some genre cliches (and the ending sawn dives into one), there’s enough rawness to make you stick with it.
