Win A Date With Tad Hamilton!

Reviewed by Rich Drees

     Rosalee (Kate Bosworth) is a young twenty-something living in a small West Virginia town. Although she has good friends in co-workers Pete (Topher Grace) and Cathy Feely (Ginnifer Goodwin), she dreams of a life beyond her work as a grocery store checkout girl filled with romance similar to the movies of actor Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel). Her dreams have a chance of coming true when she enters a contest and wins a date with the actor. Unfortunately, the contest is a way for Tad’s agent Richard (Nathan Lane) to try to curb his growing hard partying reputation. Once Tad meets Rosalee on their date, he seems struck by her down home honesty. Following her back to West Virginia, Tad asks Rosalee if she could help him become less jaded than he has become. She accepts and the two appear to be falling in love. This distresses Pete, who was hoping that after he date Rosalee would be over her Tad Hamilton fixation enough for him to be comfortable finally confessing his love for her.

     Win A Date With Tad Hamilton! is a mess of a romantic comedy. The scripting is sloppy with poorly defined characters. The story is so linear that the only surprise is that the story doesn’t even try to surprise the audience and some comedic pieces fall flat on their face.

     Watching this film, one has to wonder how old these characters are supposed to be. Are we to assume that Pete and Rosalee are the same age? We’re told they’ve been life-long friends and since see them drinking, we know that they’re at least 21. Yet Pete, as a rather young grocery store manager, is far more mature than Rosalee, who acts more like a giggly fourteen year old for most of the film. There’s such a disparity in their maturity levels that you spend most of the film wondering what Pete even sees in Rosalee.

     Tad is too vague as a character. We never seem to get a firm idea if he is really trying to be a better person and has fallen in love with Rosalee or if he’s just trying to seduce her. As such, we can’t really see why Rosalee would fall in love with him or, outside of basic jealousy, Pete’s insistence that he’s a bad guy. There’s no real tension in this phantom romantic triangle. We know from the beginning how this movie will shake out and we just sit back and wait for the inevitable conclusion.

     Fortunately, there are a few good performances to watch before the film’s inevitable conclusion. Nathan Lane turns in his usual fine performance as Tad’s neurotic agent. Having had several years on the television comedy series That 70s Show to hone his timing, Topher Grace delivers a nicely nuanced comic turn that is more than the material deserves and about the only thing that keeps one from actively despising the film.