SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE by DeWyNGaLe Rating: B-
Amanda is a young, innocent girl who works at her mother's restaurant. They have been in business for seventy-five years, but now bigger businesses are opening, taking away customers. Amanda feels responsible for the lack of customers, considering she's the cook. At the market, she encounters a strange man who sells her some crabs. When she gets back to the restaurant, she can magically cook! In the market, she also met another man named Tom, played by Sean Patrick Flanery. She learns that he is opening up a fancy, expensive restaurant. He learns about her restaurant as well. Now, Amanda is seeing Tom a lot. All of these good things started happening to her when she got those crabs. She doesn't think much of it, except she is very happy! Tom's restaurant seems like something out of a fairy tale. It is in a store that seems like it is from a fairy tale as well. Throughout the film, they continue to build it. Tom is very nervous about the opening of it.
Gellar does a nice job as the role of Amanda, but the character had no depth. We didn't know any background on the character at all, except she couldn't cook very well before she got a crab. Gellar was mis-cast as this role. In my opinion, she wasted a lot of time on effort on this film. Her talent is above this level of movie. Flanery's character of Tom is extremely annoying. We don't know anything about him, except that he is rich. Flanery gives a terrible performance. It didn't seem like he was putting any effort into the role of Tom.
Amanda continues to cook wonderful meals, which is drawing crowds of people from all over to her restaurant. She couldn't be happier. Now, strange things are going on with her and her cooking. In one scene, she and Tom float because they ate one of her dishes. Fog fills the room. These effects are extremely corny and cheap. She discovers at a dinner party that what she is feeling is going into her food. If she is upset, the people who eat it are upset. It was a pretty good concept, it just could have been portrayed a little bit better and a little more realistically. The film should have deleted the entire magic plot line and made it about Tom and Amanda, or they should have had the plot about Amanda and saving her restaurant. They don't both work together very well at all. It plays like a Bewitched episode, only 95 minutes long. The music throughout the film is very corny as well. These are the key problems in Simply Irresistible.
Nothing is ever explained in Simply Irresistible, and that gets extremely annoying. It certainly wasn't extraordinary, but it was certainly enjoyable. The ending and beginning were extremely stupid, but the middle seemed to be pretty good. Simply Irresistible did do what it was supposed to do. The goal of romantic comedies is to keep you in suspense about whether the two main characters are going to be together or not. Unlike She's All That, I found myself wanting the two to get together. Sarah Michelle Gellar saved this film from being horrible. Some of the parts in the film are extremely humorous, but some of them have been used way too many times and aren't funny anymore.
The Bottom Line- Simply Irresistible wasn't exactly irresistible, but not resistible either.
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