The fact that so many reviews have referred to this dreary Catherine Zeta-Jones vehicle as a comedy offers further evidence of the decline of the romantic drama as a viable genre.
Taking in the death of a sibling and several further personal crises, No Reservations, an adaptation of the passable German film Mostly Martha, does not fit into any currently available pigeonhole. These days, if it's not a romantic comedy it is, it seems, a romantic nothing.
Still, fans of the old-fashioned rom-dram will miss little if they steer clear of Scott Hicks's film. Unfocused and unstructured, the picture flails around damply like a speared squid before limping off pathetically towards an unconvincingly rosy sunset. It's not dreadful. It's just dreadfully boring.
Zeta-Jones, as cold and insulated as ever, stars as a driven chef in a posh Greenwich Village restaurant, which, unusually for any New York eatery more exclusive than a hot dog stand,
is decorated with colour photographs of the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. When the heroine's sister dies in a car crash, her young niece (it's Abigail Breslin, of course) is dispatched to her apartment and emotional tempering begins.
Meanwhile, a new sous chef (Aaron Eckhart), hired without the Welsh Craddock's permission, begins injecting life into the kitchen. She hates him with a fanatical vehemence that, in such films, can lead only to endless love. CZJ is rather good when playing the hostile, zealously ambitious harridan. Her cheery lovebird is somewhat less believable.
You will understand how thunderingly obvious No Reservations is when you read that, to express his character's vivacity and originality, Eckhart dances about the kitchen while miming to Pavarotti's version of Nessun dorma. Doesn't that aria translate into English as "Let No One Sleep"? That's asking rather a lot of an audience trapped before this soporific twaddle.
