A DATE WITH MISS FORTUNE (John L’Ecuyer). 97 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (February 5). See listing. Rating: NN
This romantic comedy was written and produced by real-life couple Ryan K. Scott and Jeanette Sousa, who are also its stars.
Leaning very heavily on Nia Vardalos’s 2002 sleeper My Big Fat Greek Wedding, A Date With Miss Fortune is the tale of a starry-eyed ethnic woman who falls for a white-bread sitcom writer, only to run up against the disapproval of her eccentric family.
Safe enough, but for some bizarre reason Scott and Sousa have chosen to tell the story from the guy’s perspective, which makes the ethnic characters seem even more caricatured and stereotypical. (We are expected to laugh, repeatedly, at the notion that Portuguese people love codfish and football and fear the evil eye.)
The script is so aggressively formulaic that you can practically recite the dialogue along with the characters. The plotting requires Sousa’s Maria to be a gullible simpleton, and the notion that Scott’s Jack is a brilliant comic writer is never supported by anything he says or does.
Vik Sahay, as Jack’s writing partner and only friend, finds a way to make his dialogue snap. I would have given anything for Maria to fall for him instead.
