Grant ... Cary Grant. Nah, probably not. Nobody's Cary except Cary, and he's been, well, inactive for years. But 007, a.k.a. Pierce Brosnan, isn't a bad, if paler facsimile for the Gen-Sex crowd.
Certainly it's the silky charm he applies toward a cheerfully goofy Julianne Moore, pumping her freckled freshness for laughs instead of Oscars, that narrowly rescues Laws of Attraction, an otherwise disposable dollop of rom-com tomfoolery. Attraction is to Tracy-Hepburn classics what a cocktail weenie is to chateaubriand.
These are performers not noted for comedy, but Brosnan and Moore make a likable team with a refreshingly light touch. If you're inclined to let a movie slide on pure personality superimposed over a featherweight fable, fairly fizzy banter and the familiar from-hate-to-mate formula—they meet-cute, spar with aplomb, split with regret and reconcile-cute—you could do worse than Attraction.
Lined and grayed at the temples just enough to evoke a Touch of Mink-era Cary Lite, Brosnan plays supposedly slovenly master divorce attorney Daniel Rafferty (even with exposed shirttail, shaggy locks and shambling gait, Brosnan never appears less than rakish), engaged in courtroom/bedroom warfare with fellow splitsville lawyer Audrey Woods (Moore). Naturally, they're polar opposites: Unflappable Daniel preps for combat with a pretrial snooze; ever-flappable Audrey revs up by shoveling pink Snowballs into her mouth in a bathroom stall for that sugar-rush jolt of legal-eagle energy.
They're rivals in a high-profile divorce between a dippy, zipper-challenged rock star and his ball-buster wife (hilariously batty Michael Sheen and amusingly bratty Parker Posey, vacationing from her usual indie inclinations).
In a plot turn that sends them to Ireland for no compelling reason other than perhaps framing lovely shots of rolling hillsides, they get hitched during the formula-tested night of drunken revelry. Reluctantly, they agree to temporarily remain betrothed to minimize PR damage until the trial concludes.
And therein lays Law's cute conceit: Can a pair of lawyers, thriving on the misery of those who fall in love first and marry later, succeed in a relationship by reversing the process? Absolutely nothing triggers a ripple of surprise in a script largely constructed from the reusable nuts and bolts of dozens of other scripts. But Brosnan and Moore hold the screen with a level of charisma of which true stars, that rare breed who pack the personality to turn middling material into better-than-middling movies, are made. Nora Dunn is saddled with a thankless, laughless role as the trial judge, but Francis Fisher adds a pinch of comic pepper as Audrey's quippy, youth-mad mom.
And it's tough to trash any movie in which a horrified 007 is passionately smooched in the crushing embrace of a fat, horny, mustachioed woman.