The Rebound

She’s 45, he’s 30, it could have been a fun chick flick. You’re better off catching an old Cat Jones movie on DVD.

Spurned lovers don’t drown their heartache in bottle upon bottle of Black Label or Malta; they travel the earth teaching in African schools, adopting Bangladeshi kids and offering flowers at North Indian temples. The Rebound is tribute on roller skates to one of these spurned lovers—Aram Finklestein (played by Justin Bartha).

Sandy (Catherine Zeta Jones) is a single mother who’s just given the boot to her cheating husband and moved to the city with her two kids. She meets Aram, a go-getter with parents living on the Upper East Side and a zest for Harry Potter books. He’s ‘on the path of discovery’ and is working at a coffee shop and as a human punching bag at a women’s self-defence class for the interim. Here he meets Sandy.

One thing leads to another and Sandy hires him as a nanny to take care of her puke-obsessed yet cute kids. When they are put to bed, he ends up taking care of business with the mother as well. But one fine day, Sandy does her math and realises that the boy is a boy and 15 years younger than her, and they part ways.

They meet five years and one adoption later (Aram’s souvenir from a round-the-world trip—a Bangladeshi boy named Zeke) and suddenly, the math doesn’t matter anymore. They hold hands under the table and the credits roll.

It has potential as a chick-flick. Cat Jones could suddenly not read sportsnews and announce that she loved him. He could have been watching it on a grainy TV in the African savannah; they could have met at the airport and played tonsil-hockey. Alas, it ends up in the crack between a chick flick and romantic film. So, what could be the provocation for watching this? Cat Jones? Well, there was a time you could watch a movie just because it had Cat Jones in her knickers; but that time has long gone. You could see the movie for Justin Bartha: you didn’t see enough of him in The Hangover (he’s the groom who his friends have managed to misplace on the hotel roof).

But truth be told, this is one of those movies that you see only because someone else is buying the ticket; that someone happens to be pretty; and she will sit on you if you don’t.

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