by Karyn L. Beach

Catch and Release is a romantic comedy that wants to be more than your basic meet-cute, break-up, and make-up cute at the end. It throws in death and grief, secrets and lies and tries to come up with something meaningful. The verdict? This is one film I don’t think many will want to catch, although if you do see it, it’s pretty easy to release.

Gray Wheeler (Jennifer Garner) spends what would have been her wedding day burying her fiancé, Grady, who died during his bachelor party. After the funeral, Gray moves into Grady’s old room, and, together with his guilt-ridden friends, attempts to grieve and move beyond this horrific event. Dennis (Sam Jaeger) has been secretly in love with Gray. Sam (Kevin Smith) deals with his grief in a particularly dramatic fashion. And, Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), a smarmy friend from Los Angeles who sticks around after the funeral, is the kind of guy who'd have sex w ith a caterer while at his friend's funeral. The way that Fritz immediately iritaes Gray is a sure sign they they will eventually end up together, but one more twist is thrown into the plot when Gray finds out that Fritz was helping Grady hide a major secret.

Jennifer Garner is an actress that everyone wants you to like. Her films want to paint her as the perky, girl-next-door, sort of like a K-Mart version of Julia Roberts. Yet, I just don’t think she has the charisma to pull it off. While she has a few good scenes here, she just isn’t enough to carry this movie.

The fact that she and romantic-interest Timothy Olypant have no chemistry doesn’t help much either. In fact, the most endearing performance goes to writer-director Kevin Smith, who makes a rare appearance here as just another actor.

Where Catch and Release succeeds is as a postcard for Boulder, Colorado. The Colorado tourism board should be estatic. I personally have never had any desire to go to the mountains, but the scenery in this film looked so damn beautiful that by the end I was considering giving the Rocky's a shot.

If you must catch, Catch and Release, catch it on cable.