Traveler's Wife a Waste of Time

McAdams-Bana love story is 'dull,' 'sappy'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 14, 2009 9:00 AM CDT

Critics have one good thing to say about the Time Traveler’s Wife, the love story of a man doomed to bounce through time: Eric Bana looks good naked.

  • “Watching Mr. Bana frequently strut his seminude stuff, nimbly avoiding the full-frontal reveal even as he flashes some discreet cheek, is one of the few pleasures afforded by this often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

  • “When the film's fate rests on the alchemy of its stars"—Rachel McAdams joins Bana—"you really don't want to get that wrong,” notes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. “But here, chemistry is a problem, and it proves a significant one.”
  • The film is “a slog rather than the sweeping romance it aspires to be,” writes Claudia Puig in USA Today. “Meant to be grand in the irresistibly starry-eyed vein of 1980's Somewhere in Time or 1990's Ghost, instead it's dull and sappy.”
(More film stories.)

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