Starring: Alyson Hannigan, Tony Cox, Eddie Griffin, Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge
Cert: 12A
Released: 24th February 2006

Julia (Hannigan) is fat, ugly and lonely. She is desperately holding on to the dream that, one day, true love will come her way and she will be rescued by a Prince Charming. But obviously because she is so fat everybody but her knows she is deluding herself.

Her working day is taken up waitressing at her father's family Greek restaurant and if her romantic life wasn't in enough trouble then her father insists that her suitor should comply to their families' religious and cultural roots. He's a black, Greek Jew and her mother is half Indian, half Japanese.

So she enrols the help of a renown 'date doctor' (Cox) who gives her an overhaul, makes her skinny and pretty and gets her on a dating show to meet with a handsome Englishman. It is not long before they fall in love have to meet her parents, meet his parents, meet the wedding planner, meet his best friend who happens to be a jealous, sexy ex and try to get through all that to find their happy ever after.

Date Movie is being touted as having been created by 2 of the 6 writers of the Scary Movie franchise. Immediately the alarm bells start ringing.

I'm not adverse to a bit of parody and I can understand why the Scary Movies keep getting churned out. These 'serious' action and horror flicks are begging to be sent up but for the life of me I don't understand how anything could think that they could get away with satirising a host of successful comedies. Taking the best bits of films like the Meet The's, The Wedding Planner, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Best Friend's Wedding and so forth can't really be mocked since they were a mockery in the first.

Changing the name of Jinx the cat to Jinxster must have taken them hours to think up. The male protagonist is called Grant Funkyerdoder (Adam Campbell) - you see what they did there? The wedding planner's name is Jell-O - Huh? Huh? And the date doctor? They cleverly called him Hitch . Oh no, wait a minute.

I don't think there is any original element to this film. Absolutely no degree of imagination or effort has been put into the script. At any given moment, another rip-off is slipped in for no reason other than to see how many references they can squeeze in. Napoleon Dynamite, Mr & Mrs Smith, When Harry Met Sally, Revenge Of The Sith, King Kong, Wedding Crashers; any film that has ever had the slightest box office credibility has been used in the hope of leeching from their success. It has not even been disguised as an homage of these films because they've been so indiscriminately and unceremoniously crammed in there.

The real shame has to be for the cast who must either be really desperate for work or just don't give a damn what tat they put they're name to. Hannigan has proven that she is a deft comedy actor and does so even more in this; she and Campbell are very watchable but ultimately wasted. It's no surprise to see Griffin as this is the sort of inane spoofery that he normally appears in but it was almost heartbreaking to have Willard and Coolidge show up to, basically, recite the funny lines from Meet The Fockers that Hoffman and Streisand can't be beaten on. This is a slur on the CV of some exceptional comedic actors.

I couldn't write 'awful' enough times to get across how awful it is. A real waste of anyone's time that, when not using other, better script writers' jokes, relies on racial and social stereotyping for playground sniggers. If it has any plus points it's that it’s a reminder of how good the originals are and will want you to watch them again in an attempt to exorcise this drivel from your memory.