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It's easy to predict the ending of formulaic films, but Australia's Russian Doll takes the cake. Anyone with a brief synopsis and half a brain can deduce every twist and turn without ever prying themselves from the couch. It's the old, simple story of Boy meets Girl, Boy hates Girl, Boy is forced to spend time with Girl, Boy falls in love with Girl. Does this kind of thing happen often enough in real life to justify the number of films that share that premise?
The Boy is Harvey (Hugo Weaving, The Matrix), a private investigator who specializes in catching cheating spouses. Harvey has a girlfriend to whom he is about to propose, but learns she's involved with one of the men he's investigating. His friends try to fix him up on a blind date, but it goes horribly wrong (although she's not nearly as bad as Janeane Garofalo in Bye Bye Love - "I'm just looking for something that will prevent me from throwing myself in front of a bus").
In the meantime, the Girl, who we will come to know as Katia (Natalia Novikova), has just come to Australia from St. Petersberg, planning to meet and marry the man she's been communicating with over the Internet for several months. When Katia gets to his house, the man is dead, and she begins to have an affair with a married man named Ethan (David Wenham), who happens to be Harvey's best friend.
You can practically fill in the blanks yourself. Katia is going to be deported unless she marries someone, and the horny Ethan convinces Harvey to be her faux beau. After all, he does have an extra bedroom. Harvey and Katia can't stand each other at first - he's a quiet, aspiring novelist and she's a loud, obnoxious smoker with thick, drain-clogging Russian hair. They have various barriers to overcome, like language ("Where do you keep the shits?" "In the toilet." "No, the shits for the bed.") and religion (Harvey must convert to Judaism for the wedding) before the romantic sparks begin to fly.
If you think Doll sounds a bit like Green Card, you're not too far off. It's predictable, but thankfully short (unlike, say, A Knight's Tale or The Mummy Returns, which both clock in over 30 minutes longer than Doll). Weaving does well as the harried sad sack who looks as if he'll crumble from the weight of the lies he keeps piling atop other lies. Doll isn't a bad film at all, but it's something we've already seen a bunch of times already.
1:27 - R for some sexuality and language
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