About Adam (2000) 

romantic comedy

directed by : Gerard Stembridge
featuring : Stuart Townsend - Kate Hudson - Frances O'Connor - Charlotte Bradley
running time : 1 hour 45 minutes 
Gerard Stembridge directs this charming comedy about a handsome stranger who wreaks havoc on an entire family. Pub torch singer Lucy Owen (Kate Hudson) falls for Adam (Stuart Townsend) as soon as she lays eyes on him. Tired of a string of failed short-termed relationships, she succumbs to Adam's radiate charisma and agrees to marry him after only knowing him for a scant couple of days. Yet when she brings him home to her family, she finds to her dismay that his magnetism works equally well on her two older sisters. The middle one, Laura (Frances O'Connor), is a shy bookish sort whose love for poetry proves to be her weakness, while eldest sister Alice (Charlotte Bradley) is aloof at first, but eventually she also yields to his wiles. This film was screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

The original title of this distressingly unfunny romantic comedy was All About Adam, thus implying that writer/director Gerard Stembridge intended this to be a wry, wickedly satiric look at double-crossing à la All About Eve. No such luck, as this film is witlessly conceived and doesn't have a satiric or inventively comic bone in its body. The film lumbers on endlessly about its bevy of characters, but never stops to wonder if the audience will care about where they're headed. For no discernible reason, this Irish entry is cast with a very American kate Hudson and Australian Frances O'Connor, both of whom lose their trademark appeal in woefully underdeveloped roles that do not suit either of them. Similarly, the charming Stuart Townsend is saddled with an unplayable role, never conveying to viewers whether they should like or loathe his character's duplicitous behavior. The picture also fails in telling a deliberately fractured narrative (from several points of view) because the filmmakers already seem so unsteady in the storytelling, resulting in an all-around muddle of a movie. About Adam screened at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival under its original title, only to debut on U.S. screens more than a year later, pointing to a lack of confidence in its acquirer.