What's Playing: May 14th

Opening this weekend...

Robin Hood (Universal Pictures)

Sherwood Forest just got a little grittier. Don’t expect any merry men in tights or Bryan Adams power ballads now that Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe have arrived in Nottingham. Robin Hood gets the Gladiator treatment and is retold as the story of an expert archer (Crowe) toward the end of the 12th century who assembles a gang of mercenaries to rise up against a tyrannical sheriff (Matthew Macfadyen) and the ruling class.

Just Wright (Fox Searchlight Pictures)


Although the posters make it look confusingly like Love and Basketball 2, this film, starring Queen Latifah and Common, is a sub-par rom-com about a physical therapist (Latifah) who can’t find a good man until she falls for the basketball player (Common) she is helping recover from a career-threatening injury. Problem is, he’s already dating her knockout best friend (Paula Patton). Actually, the real problem is, this movie is a tremendous waste of time and talent.

Letters to Juliet (Summit Entertainment)

Even Amanda Seyfried and her impossibly perfect golden mane, pillowy lips and Keane painting doe eyes can't save this tale of a New York City fact-checker on vacation in Verona, the setting of Romeo and Juliet, who finds a letter written to the fictional lover and sets off on a Tuscan adventure to search out true love. Critics are calling it "insufferable,""flat," and "like a Taylor Swift pop hit." Ouch.

"Just Wright"? Yeah, Not So Much

Those billboards around town you keep confusing for "Love and Basketball 2," they're actually ads for "Just Wright," an overly simplistic romantic comedy starring two very talented and charismatic rappers, though you wouldn't know it by this film.

Queen Latifah takes the lead as Leslie Wright, a 35-year-old physical therapist who may or may not live at home, and, if she doesn't, her omnipresent parents, James Pickens Jr. and Pam Grier, sure do stop by a hell of a lot. A die hard Nets fan, she meets their alarmingly tiny star player, Scott McKnight (Common) one night at a gas station and they very platonically hit it off. When he suffers a potentially career ending injury, she nurses him back to health, predictably falling for him along the way. The problem is he's already engaged to her vapid, gold digger god-sister and best friend, Morgan, (the unspeakably beautiful Paula Patton).

Gasp!

Will these two get together? Will he choose inner beauty over a trophy wife? Will someone please tell us who green-lit this trash?

Seeming less like a film and more like a very loooong tedious episode of a sitcom, the only thing missing from this in-aptly titled flick is canned laughter. Without chemistry or pizzazz, the plot trudges along with painful predictability until all you can do is roll your eyes and whisper to your next door seatmate, "Did they really just do that?" Oh yes, they did.

Let's just start with the main characters' names, shall we?

Wright and McKnight.

Get it, get it? He's her McKnight in shining armor. She's Miss Wright. No really, someone got paid a lot of money to write that. And it's nuances such as those which make "Just Wright" so very wrong. Director Sanaa Hamri, who previously helmed the very loveable "Something New," as well as the offensively awful "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2," turns her leads into caricatures. Forced and unrelentingly cheesy, the only thing worse than the writing is the acting which is best compared to a basketball groupie's silicone implants: stiff, inorganic, and implausibly overblown.

Queen Latifah was nominated for an Oscar for cryin' out loud. Usually, we would pay to watch her read the phone book. Could this be Common's fault? He may be easy on the eyes and a great musician, but after a solid debut in the otherwise wildly misguided, "Smokin Aces," he's done nothing but recycle the same corrupt cop performance from "Street Kings" to "Date Night." Phylicia Rashad, a sitcom veteran, gives the only grounded performance in the entire film, perhaps because she's so comfortable with the construct, and, sidenote, what the hell was Mercad Brookes' agent thinking? The poor guy is a glorified extra.

It's sad to see so much talent squandered on a paint-by-numbers rom-com that's less satisfying than a rerun of "Saved by the Bell."