Must Love Dogs

While it has a good heart and decent casting with Diane Lane and John Cusack, Must Love Dogs is just a routine, often-mundane romantic comedy. Lane plays a divorced spinster (yeah, right!) who is forced into Internet dating by her loving sister (Elizabeth Perkins). Enter Cusack as another recently divorced person who, surprise, finds Lane intriguing. They date once; they screw up; they date again; they screw up again; and then they finally get together for good, because that’s what happens in these things. There are some funny moments, but they are killed by sequences like a Partridge Family sing-along that is acid on the ears. As far as Internet-dating movies go, this one is much better than the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan vomit train You’ve Got Mail, but pales in comparison to the Sandra Bullock-Brendan Fraser laugh-riot Internet Dates Are Go! Actually, that movie doesn’t exist, but it seems like a possibility, doesn’t it?