#1487: Worst Movies Ever – Win A Date With Tad Hamilton

Piggly Wiggly checkout girl Rosalee is Tad Hamilton’s biggest fan, much to the delight of her best friend Cathy, who is equally Hamilton-obsessed, and much to the irritation of her best friend/boss Pete, who can’t stand Tad.   When Rosalee enters and wins a contest called ‘Win A Date With Tad Hamilton!’ which has been designed to rectify negative publicity from Hamilton’s party-boy actions, Pete begins to act out.   He’s long loved Rosalee but said nothing along the way.  After Tad and Rosalee’s date, Tad tags along with Rosalee back to West Virginia, where he faces new competition for Rosalee from Pete.

Win A Date With Tad Hamilton is awful.  If a nurse were to ask me on the pain scale where this movie was, I’d give it a 7.   For starters, it’s poorly acted.   Topher Grace can’t even seem to muster anything other than an eyebrow raise every so often, and Josh Duhamel and Kate Bosworth might as well be replaced by cardboard cutouts.   Remember the good old days when Kate Bosworth looked like she was remotely healthy?   It’s weird to see her in this movie looking so unlike her current self, where she resembles a human lollipop.

More than anything, Tad Hamilton is hackneyed and cliché to the extreme.  No one got the memo to the writers of this one that punchlines for jokes shouldn’t be seen miles away, or perhaps, maybe, that this story had been tread and retread in different variations over years and years of cinema.  Perhaps it was too much to ask for a little credit for the audience to do more than slurp down whatever sugar-coated slop Hollywood threw in the trough in front of them.   Perhaps it was too much to ask for these people to make a good movie.

There is a scene in this movie where I finally gave up on ever finding something remotely likable in this one, and that is a scene where Rosalee’s West Virginia town realizes Tad Hamilton has come to town for her – and that she’s dating him.   She enters the Piggly Wiggly and all of the shoppers and cashiers, save for brooding manager Pete, stop and applaud her.

…For what?   For getting it on with a Hollywood star?

That’s pretty much why they’re clapping for her.

This movie isn’t actually a movie.  It’s recycling of the very worst kind, by people involved taking every romantic comedy cliché and adding a dash of the kind of story they think people want to see (real-life person gets to date a celebrity!  Who doesn’t want that, huh?) and then vomiting it up onto the written page.  The movie doesn’t even give the viewer a smidgen of credibility; they follow the plot you expect but they don’t build it up like they should.   Ebert says it better than I do, of course.

It is considered a flop and rightly so.   Nothing of this movie is deserving of anyone’s time.   It certainly wasn’t deserving of mine.

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