The Hindu Business Line : <I>Hitch</I> hardly takes your breath away

HITCH irritates in a sweet-sour way. It keeps you in your seat because of that inevitable attraction people have for falling in love. It bores you because the film never gets its head above clichéd urban life.

Love may have adapted to survive but don't you sometimes wish it stayed pristine and not smart?

Alex Hitch Hitchens (Will Smith) is a legendary - and deliberately anonymous - New York city `date doctor' who for a fee has helped countless men woo the women of their dreams. While coaching Albert (Kevin James), a meek accountant who is smitten with a glamorous celebrity, Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta), Hitch finally meets his match in the person of the gorgeous, whip-smart Sara Melas (Eva Mendes), a gossip columnist who follows Allegra's every move," so went the official synopsis from Columbia Pictures.

Besides the plot, the inevitable laugh associated with bumbling men trying to impress women and the planted politically correct comment (apparently all of Hitch's clients love their women), the film is threaded together by Hitch's observations like, "life is not how many breaths you take, it is the moments that take your breath away".

Fans of cool and those enamoured by city life will probably like Hitch. For, it makes no attempt to talk a language different from the structured approach to friendship preferred by urbanites wary of each other. Everything is a defined ritual. So, when Hitch teaches Albert the subtleties of dancing with women, the casualty is the latter's natural dancing style, "a little bit of me being myself".

And that self has to be perceivably gross to emphasise the comparative elegance of the quarry and her language of courtship. Particularly, trying are the smart comments traded between Hitch and Sara, which leaves you wondering if you are watching a film or enduring one of the many smart, competitive interactions that plague urban spaces.

Just when you hoped humanity would wrench such tactics off relationships and let people be; Hitch comes along and sinks the ship. Still, an enjoyable film particularly if you are an urban junkie with identity tucked out of reach and a penchant for chess games as relationships.

The film releases here on Friday.

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