Early in the time-travel romance Kate & Leopold, in a scene removed after its screening for critics, the film used to throw in a promisingly wicked twist, casting Meg Ryan as a marketing consultant working a test screening for an unpromising romantic comedy. She's the one responsible for convincing Smucker's to remove the seeds from its jam (never mind that the change makes it jelly) and for reducing so many films to pabulum with the broadest possible market spread. Unfortunately, this unexpected jab at Ryan's image pays off only in a slightly more sophisticated variety of pabulum. As the other half of the eponymous equation, Hugh Jackman plays a cash-strapped 19th-century nobleman and inventor who has traveled to New York in order to find a wife of less limited means. Instead, he finds a time-traveling descendant (Liev Schreiber) paying a brief visit to Jackman's era after discovering a portal to the past. Chasing Schreiber into the 21st century, Jackman unwittingly lands in a Crocodile Dundee-like fish-out-of-water scenario that has him encountering such modern marvels as the television and the safety razor. It also places himself in the path of Ryan, who almost immediately reverts from a hard-nosed professional into her more familiar pixie-with-a-wardrobe-budget persona. Before long, she begins leading Jackman through a Nora Ephron-like version of New York, though unlike Ephron's work, Kate scares up a few genuinely winning moments to offset the phony charm surrounding its leads. The relationship between Jackman and Breckin Meyer, Ryan's brother and roommate, becomes far more interesting than the relationship between Jackman and Ryan when Jackman's outmoded, gentlemanly approach to wooing serves Meyer, Cyrano-like, in his otherwise ill-fated attempts to win the woman of his dreams. Otherwise, Heavy and Girl, Interrupted director James Mangold—helming what's by far the least interesting film of his career—sticks closely to the romantic-comedy formula, all forced chemistry and moonlit idylls in spite of the presence of time portals and the like. Unlike the film Ryan once dissected in one of its few compelling scenes, Kate & Leopold doesn't end with a gooey reconciliation set to Vanessa Williams' "Save The Best For Last," but otherwise, it embraces the conventions it's trying to mock.
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