ONLY YOU (Norman Jewison). 113 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (July 24). See listings. Rating: NN
Norman Jewison’s trifling and forgettable Only You (1994) had Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. enjoying each other’s company on a Roman holiday like watered-down Hallmarks to Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Now, more than 20 years later, we have a Chinese remake with Lust, Caution’s Tang Wei and Liao Fan making an even fainter impression.
Tang is adequate as Fang Yuan, a bride-to-be who ditches her fiancé and heads to Italy to find a stranger named Song Kunming because two fortune tellers say he’s the one to marry. She stumbles on Liao’s Feng Dali, who can’t quite capture the Downey mischief as the man who opportunistically assumes the prophetic moniker to make her swoon.
Their romance is built on deceit, implausible coincidences, a lot of sulking and montages that tell us things are going swell.
That leaves no room for the two stars to actually charm each other – or us.
