LOVE, Kloudiia

This movie review of Definitely, Maybe is written for NS Portal.

If there are only three chances in life to make love happen, I’m pretty sure Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) would have thought he had blown all his off when he got the letter of divorce from his wife and mother of his only 10 year old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin).

An unexpected sex education in Maya’s school created furore among the students. Curiosity of the little ones shot to the highest level, and Maya was no exception. She quizzed Will on her birth, and that inevitably led to ultimate and most feared question – what happened between her dad and her mom? And to explain a matter as complicated as love to even a wise kid like Maya, it meant a trip down memory lane where Will relived all his three relationships one more time.

The story began in 1992 when Will had to temporarily part with his college lover Emily (Elizabeth Banks) to hit New York for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the same time that he dabbled with and learnt the ins and outs of politics for his career, he met two more girls – April (Isler Fisher), the free-spirited and apolitical confidante and Summer (Rachel Weisz), the ambitious and extremely attractive journalist.

As Will recounted his love tales with each of the ladies, Maya’s job was to guess which one of them eventually gave birth to her. This task of identifying her mom was made more challenging with Will changing the women’s names. Did this little wise one scored her bingo?

Nostalgia had a strange way of making one’s emotions more vulnerable and exposed. And it did just that as Will discovered that he could, potentially, have another shot.

Plot wise, I found it adequately acceptable without any major twists and neither turns nor anything totally unpredictable. Acting wise, the cast put up a generally good performance, though one would expect slightly more from ex-Little Miss Sunshine Abigail.

The attempts at humour met with success as the seeds sowed harvested scores of laughter from the audience in the cinema at the designated moments. Though not exactly die-hard romantic, Definitely, Maybe definitely passed the love test with pretty good screen chemistry between Will and his three girlfriends.

It is not hard to detect the similarity in the directorial style of this movie with Love Actually, as they both came from the same hands, though love can be felt more intensely in that movie, actually.

If I were to rate, Definitely, Maybe would get 6.5 out of 10 points. Definitely worth watching, no maybe about it.