Simply Irresistible review

For an idea so seemingly concerned with delicate romantic triggers and sensual nuances, you might expect a little subtlety. Not from this heavily Disneyfied stew of clunky foreshadowing and crappy caricatures (self-obsessed yuppie girlfriend, stiff upper-management, uppity and unshaven French folk).

The trouble with the by-numbers rom-com is there's so little to look forward to. The rom is telegraphed (with a far too lingering stare) in the first scene, and the trend for the com is set equally early with a couple of pitiful attempts at dopey slapstick (collision with door-frame, paper plane caught in hairdo). Gellar is clearly here to soften up and shed a bit of the Buffy rigour, but there's barely a flicker of sizzle in her chemistry with the smarmy Flanery and, given the potential to play with the carnal-food angle, the sexuality is frustratingly U-cert.

It's all a shameless steal from 1993's Mexican arthouse hit Like Water For Chocolate, but both the first-time director and the writer ("Just be yourself!") don't have the ammo to take the emotion-as-food premise anywhere interesting.

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Amanda's muse, an obviously animatronic crustacean, pops up occasionally, providing the only sense of tension (please God, don't let it start talking). Some of the imagery (jets of steam shooting from cooked apples, a fantasy tryst on an under-construction dancefloor) is reasonably handled, but it's lost in the limp acting and slipshod pace. There seems to be an attempt at transplanting a goody-goody Doris Day sensibility onto a curiously `80s-feel New York. And how unappealing does that sound?

Early on, Amanda's sous chef offers a theory: whenever men mess with their belts or put their hands in their pockets, they're thinking about sex. Which, as a pithy, quotable slice of aphorism, is, like the movie, flat as a flaccid soufflé.