Stars: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, John Lithgow, Adam Scott
Running time: 100 mins
Rating: ★★

BEGORRAH, bejesus. Be quiet, you eejit. This isn’t Ireland, this is an American’s view of Ireland which is as accurate as Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent in Mary Poppins.

Director Anand Tucker has made some serious films in the past – Hilary And Jackie and When Did You Last See Your Father? – and I can only assume he signed up for this without reading the script. I felt like hitting my head on the Blarney Stone at the awful Oirishness of this allegedly romantic endeavour.

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Amy Adams, a two-time Oscar nominee in other circumstances, stars as American Anna – an apartment stager by profession – who determines to surprise her boyfriend of four years by proposing to him.

She’s heard of the quaint Irish legend that fiancees can pop the question to their boyfriends once every four years on, you’ve guessed it, February 29.

So Anna follows her cardiologist (a man without a heart himself) lover from Boston to Dublin to get down on one knee and propose (what else did you think she was going to do in a PG movie?).

Planes, bad weather and a complete absence of the luck of the Irish leave her stranded in the wrong part of Ireland with only the begrudging help of a pub chef Declan (Matthew Goode, from Brideshead Revisited and A Single Man) to guide her.

As their journey progresses, lurching from one disaster to another, Anna becomes more irritating and Declan more laid back. Do you need to be told that the pair fall for each other?

Of course not – you’ve seen this plot many times before and usually done better.