Romantic happiness

When you consider it, "leading man" is an odd job description. It belongs to yesterday's cinema, when so-called leading men were well-groomed, well-spoken, perhaps not too well-behaved for the purposes of romance or comedy, but capable of being made to mend their playboy ways when the right girl put the arm lock on them.

Cary Grant was a leading man of his day: Hugh Grant, of our day. What pleasure there is in Two Weeks Notice is largely due to him. In the Hollywood tradition, it's a sex comedy without sex-play, but with quite a lot of comic lines, in which two people in glamorous jobs battle for control of each other and then call it a draw.

The trick lies in stalling the union as long as the plot holds out. Two weeks, in this case, is stretching it a bit: so is 101 minutes.

But the pairing of its two stars, Grant and Sandra Bullock, is appealing. They look as if they enjoyed each other: so we do, too. Grant is an English millionaire property developer in New York, on bantering terms with Donald Trump (played by himself), who's in perpetual clinches when he's not closing deals.

Advised by his stuffy elder brother to stop hiring - and bedding - female assistants from the St Tropez School of Law, he impulsively hires the pro bono lawyer who's protesting against his plans to knock down a community centre and put up condos by holding on to the wreckers' ball.

Sandra Bullock plays the lady for all her nuisance value, adding to obstinacy the same strain of closet celibacy that used to make Doris Day the target of male chauvinist innuendoes about her virginity in romantic comedies like Pillow Talk.

While Grant's a shameless playboy along Rock Hudson lines, only slimmer, Bullock's an idealist who won't surrender to love except on her terms. He's all relaxed; she's all headstrong-Such stars can do this on automatic pilot, but their respective personas give the illusion of freshness and, for a time, vitality.

Grant soon finds his new hired hand indispensable for such important decisions as picking which photo of him best suits the cover of People magazine. He summons her from bridesmaid's duties to help choose the suit to go with his tie.

Exasperated by his egocentric ways, she gives him two weeks' notice to find a replacement for her and then, when a hotshot redhead (Alicia Witt) steps into her job, she spends the rest of the time in a jealous tizzy as she sees the guy she loved to hate being romanced by this seductive intruder. Can it be love?

The plot is undernourished - there's a particularly sluggish midsection when the argy-bargy between Grant and Bullock flat-lines into retributive recitative. The appearance of Bullock's rival is delayed too long: Stanley Shapiro or George Axelrod, who wrote the best of the Fifties sex-comedies, wouldn't have bungled that.

And the comic mismatch between Grant and Bullock reaches a novel pitch of desperation in a painfully unfunny scene of diarrhoea in a car amid gridlocked traffic. (Can you imagine? I hope not.)

However, writer-director Marc Lawrence, who scripted Bullock's last vehicle, Miss Congeniality, is a dab hand at little bits of business that feel as if they've been saved up for just such slack moments: Grant and Bullock digging their forks into each other's lunch in token of the intimacy neither will concede; or Bullock, appalled by her employer's extravagance, dropping a dime into what she takes to be a street person's begging cup, then getting berated for spoiling his coffee.