The trouble with romantic comedies like this one from Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses) is that you know exactly what’s going to happen after about 15 minutes. They have to be better than simply competent to stop you walking out.

At first I thought Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, plus a halfway decent screenplay, might just be able to swing this one over 107 minutes. Bullock plays a bitchy New York book editor who rules her office with an iron rod. However, when she faces deportation — she went abroad with a US visa even though she is, in fact, Canadian — she conceives a plan to marry her put-upon assistant (Reynolds) who, naturally, can’t stand her. That way, she might be able to stay. Having blackmailed him, he in turn blackmails her with a few conditions of his own.

So they set off to visit his throughly provincial family (Mary Steenburgen and Craig T Nelson are his mum and dad) with an impromptu wedding in the works and a suspicious immigration officer (Denis O’Hare) on their tail.

At first, The Proposal shows enough wit to carry its familiar plot — despite the fact that you know for certain that the odd couple will finally fall in love. A friend of Reynolds tells him that this is the first time he’s ever seen anyone attempting to “sleep his way to the middle”.

But then everything becomes so obviously pre-determined that Bullock and Reynolds are left rueing the fact that they aren’t as good as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and someone like Iz Diamond hasn’t written the script. If he had he would surely have cut out Oscar Nunez’s unfunny exotic dancer who turns out to be some sort of clergyman in charge of the wedding. 

In the end, this turns out to be another bad choice for Bullock who, without playing badly, sinks in the general morass.