Life or Something Like It film review

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LIFE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

Lara Croft, the video game heroine brought to life by Angelina Jolie, was more real than Lanie Kerigan, the superficial, self-serving caricature she plays in this hokey romantic comedy. In the hope of averting attention away from her prominent lips, Jolie sports a platinum fright wig that dominates proceedings, undermining any attempt by the film to strive for something more than banality.

Even the film's writer, John Scott Shepherd, confessed to being shocked by Jolie's appearance. But the truth is Kerigan's hair is only one of many problems that befall Life Or Something Like It. As it sinks in a wellspring of strained believability and bathos, it's only buoyed by an engaging performance from Edward Burns as the casually charming Pete, whose feisty relationship with Kerigan provides the film with its best moments.

Kerigan is a tough, ambitious SeattleTV reporter obsessed with her appearance, who unabashedly states "my hair is my trademark." Boasting a "great job, great friends, great man, great apartment," her life is perfect. With her boss putting her up for a prestigious network job in New York, the only apparent blip on her horizon is being reassigned with Pete, a cameraman with whom she once had a fling. That is until she interviews a notorious street sage, Prophet Jack (Tony Shalhoub), who tells her, amongst various other predictions, that in one week's time she will be dead.

Distressed, she turns to Pete for reassurance, but finds little comfort in his flippant response, "If I found out my life was a meaningless quest for approval, I'd be upset too." One by one Prophet Jack's other predictions prove correct, and with a growing sense of doom, she begins to question the validity of the path she has chosen, the person's she's become and how she can find meaning in her life before her imminent demise.

At Life Or Something Like It's core is a cliched story of redemption, complete with the usual cast of characters including the ill-suited boyfriend (Christian Kane), the squabbling sibling (Lisa Thornhill) and the distorted values. Had the epiphany not befallen someone so flamboyantly shallow, whose appearance masked any discernable humanity or substance, then her salvation and well-being might have been a matter of some concern, but it did. And then of course, there's that hair.