Two Weeks Notice Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)December 20th, 2002
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It's mindless crap like Two Weeks' Notice that makes you appreciate original romantic comedies like Punch-Drunk Love. Doesn't matter who's in 'em (see Ralph Fiennes in Maid in Manhattan for further proof) so long as they follow the same safe, boring, predictable trajectory that, apparently, is a winning formula. But the thing that killed me about Notice is its disorganization and lack of direction, even though anyone with a second-grade education knows how it's going to end.
Essentially a "different" take on Hollywood Story #3 (boy and girl meet and hate each other, but eventually fall in love despite being complete opposites), Notice plays like a cut-rate version of You've Got Mail, which itself was a cut-rate version of a million other pictures. Sandra Bullock (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) is Lucy Kelson, an Ivy League-educated lawyer and bleeding heart liberal, just like her crunchy parents (Robert Klein and Dana Ivey). When the film opens, Lucy is in the process of saving a Brooklyn theatre from the dreaded wrecking ball. We never find out whether she succeeds because Notice quickly zaps us to Coney Island, where a local community center is scheduled to be destroyed so a lucrative high-rise can be built by a wealthy British developer.
The developer is George Wade (Hugh Grant, About a Boy), and he immediately receives the brunt of Lucy's ire. Instead of paying someone to have her killed, like any good developer would do, George offers Lucy a job as his chief counsel. It seems that George's brother and business partner Howard (David Haig) keeps firing the company's lawyers because George only hires uneducated bimbos who he bangs and quickly discards. Lucy reluctantly accepts the offer, thinking she'll be able to do more good for her community from the inside of a corporate behemoth.
Notice's writer-director Marc Lawrence (it's his directorial debut, though he has penned junk like The Out-of-Towners and Bullock's own duds Miss Congeniality and Forces of Nature) uses montage and title cards to show us the charming yet indecisive George quickly becoming dependent on Lucy, which ultimately leads to her giving him the titular two weeks' notice (hey - notice the apostrophe?) after he pulls her out of a wedding ceremony to help him pick out a suit.
So Lucy hates George for being a prick, and George hates Lucy for leaving him high and dry. Gosh, I hope they're able to overcome their differences before the film ends, otherwise I don't know what I'll do! As bad as Notice is, Bullock and Grant have far more chemistry than J.Lo and R.Fi did in Manhattan. They make the film barely watchable, as opposed to unwatchable. Then again, when you toss in Counting Crows' awful rendition of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," you're right back to unwatchable.
1:40 - PG-13 for some sex-related humor
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