In post-9-11 New York, marriage is the air, or so it may seem. The unpredictable nature of love and the fickleness of the human heart will rear their mighty heads. And when they do, they shall tear apart some couples, bring others together and force one woman to make a fateful choice in 2008’s forgotten Uma Thurman vehicle The Accidental Husband.

Pulling double duty in this direct-to-video, mid-aughts misfire, producer and star Uma Thurman is Dr. Emma Lloyd, a rich, renowned writer and radio host where listeners call in to get advice on relationship problems. Why she is referred to as a doctor is never made explicitly clear, as there is never a whiff of a degree or that she dispenses meds or something like that. Emma seems more akin to a Carrie Bradshaw-style figure. She is a minor media personality who tosses around opinions like they’re going out of style.

9 out of 10 times, her advice espouses practicality and restraint in love, for reasons that will be (sort of) revealed later. Her trepidatious outlook eventually comes back to bite her in the rump roasts when Sophia (Justina Machado) calls into the radio show. It turns out that Sophia is having second thoughts about marrying Patrick (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a brawny, rambunctious, meathead of a firefighter. When Emma learns that the couple has only been together for five months, she immediately convinces Sophia to break off the relationship, provoking a wounded Patrick to seek revenge in the most outlandish way possible.

Emma, we learn, is set to get married herself. She has her publisher Richard (a great Colin Firth) in the crosshairs, a man who is completely kind, totally devoted but about as exciting as watching paint dry or the latest Marvel AI slop. When Patrick learns that they are to wed, he sees his opportunity to get even. He files a marriage license between Emma and himself with the help of his tech-savvy young neighbor. Naturally, this throws a wrench in the good doctor’s plans. No longer can she focus squarely on trying cakes or planning her reception. She must seek out the firefighter and swiftly annul the marriage. But of course, as you might expect, all of this doesn’t go according to plan.

One thing my girlfriend and I continually wonder about is how a host of good actors wind up in shit films. We had that conversation again while watching The Accidental Husband, which features a lot of talent packed into a pretty crappy final product. Written by first- and last-time screenwriters Mimi Hare, Clare Naylor and Bonnie Sikowitz, The Accidental Husband is an incredibly predictable film. If you’ve seen a rom-com or two, then you probably know how its story will shake out just from my synopsis. Despite Emma being a blue blood tight ass who’s cautious about love and Patrick a working-class rapscallion who jumps in headfirst, they inevitably catch feelings. And by the end, Emma must choose between him and Richard.

But being predictable is actually the least of its problems, at least from the perspective of this particular reviewer. As an old man living in a country which is starting to look similar to Rome in the 5th century, I find myself craving a bit of predictability these days. Given that, it should come as no surprise at that one of my favorite movie-watching experiences in recent years was actually Leap Year, another predictable romantic comedy that explored how opposites attract. With its strong arcs, acting and aesthetics, that 2010 Amy Adams’ film proved sometimes it doesn’t matter if you know where a story is going. There can still be a lot of pleasure found along the way.

The Accidental Husband, though, lacks Leap Year’s skillful execution and is completely devoid of its wit and charm. Unlike that film, the characters in The Accidental Husband never develop much beyond the way they are originally introduced. Whenever the filmmakers try to do so, it falls completely flat. Consider when the story attempts to delve into the reason behind Emma’s sober attitude toward love later in the film. We meet her father, Wilder, played by a somnolent Sam Shepard, who (maybe) was a bit of a lecherous skirt-chaser in his younger years. Yet just as soon as The Accidental Husband insinuates this point, it’s dropped. We never get the necessary clarity into how this traumatic experience might have shaped her worldview on love, relationships and the trustworthiness of men.

What’s even more detrimental is that the film never allows us to see the relationship between Emma and Patrick play out in a way that feels authentic. Whereas in Leap Year we were able to witness Adams’ Anna and Matthew Goode’s Declan organically grow to trust, like and love one another, here we’re just sort of told that a romantic bond has formed. There is never that scene that occurs in so many of these types of films. You know the one I am talking about: where the characters jointly experience something that inverts their preconceived notions and paves the way for greater intimacy.

If there is a scene that comes close to this it would undoubtedly be when Patrick invites Emma to his Indian neighbors’ Upanayanam ceremony. Up until this point, it hasn’t been exactly clear how she has perceived Patrick, which is already problem enough. But even if that had been established properly, this scene would still be a failure for one reason. Patrick doesn’t really do anything different during the ceremony than what he had been doing previously. He doesn’t suddenly display some sort of disarming silliness or unexpectedly behave in a particularly virtuous manner. He just acts like the same galoot he was before. The only difference being he’s wearing a dhoti like a complete asshole.

Because the film denies us any understanding or development of its romantic duo as either individuals or as a couple, viewer investment in their ultimate fate is unsurprisingly limited. Not helping matters is the rank incompetence of some of the film’s technical aspects, which detracts rather than enhances your involvement in the story. Director Griffin Dunne, who is better known as an actor in films like Scorsese’s classic comedy After Hours, is certainly no maestro behind the camera. To his credit, he successfully draws an aesthetic contrast early on between Emma’s and Patrick’s respective worlds. But his department heads later start dropping the ball in all sorts of weird ways that take you right out of the story.

Perhaps one of the weirdest is an aerial shot that pans away from the characters and then hangs over the skyline for Manhattan for so long you wonder for a moment if they’re ending things early. Such strangeness is eclipsed only by an absolutely jaw-dropping moment where the film’s editor breaks the 180-degree rule. Each of these is sort of fascinating to watch on a theoretical level but make the film feel generally amateurish and distracting.

As the film’s leads, Thurman and Morgan don’t help matters either. I think Thurman is trying hard in her respective part, which is nice to see, and not really a surprise. Considering she also has a producer credit, she clearly had some passion for the material, although exactly what sparked this interest is far from obvious. Despite her efforts, she never makes Emma into a particularly sympathetic figure and comes across as sorta’ one note. Emma begins the film as a tightly wound ball of anxiety and ends the film in basically the same way.

Far worse, however, is Morgan’s Patrick. Now to be clear, I am not anti-Morgan. I love his campy menace as Negan in The Walking Dead. I love him as dead man walking Denny Duquette in Grey’s Anatomy. Hell, I even really liked him as The Comedian in Zack Snyder’s generally loathsome adaptation of Watchmen. There is one scene in particular that he totally nails in that film. When his and Patrick Wilson’s “superhero” characters break up a protest with fascistic levels of violence, Wilson’s Night Owl despairingly inquires, “What happened to the American Dream?” Grinning like a jackal, Morgan yells out: “It came true! You’re looking at it!”—perfectly capturing that character’s ruthlessly sardonic nihilism.

But Morgan here is simply miscast. To be fair, almost any actor would have struggled with the part. Patrick is a deeply unlikeable character who completely upends Emma’s life with his initial meddling and is not upfront about his intentions or behaviors. To add a cherry on top, he often behaves like an obnoxious goon, such as when he forces Emma to take him to a cake tasting for her upcoming wedding and runs around the room like a little boy crashing out from too much sugar.

And yet, the movie clearly wants us to like Patrick and root for him to win Emma over. The only actor who my partner and I believe could have possibly pulled that off is the one-and-only Matthew McConaughey. With his inimitable mixture of masculinity and goofiness, he might not have saved The Accidental Husband. But he could have made it “alright, alright, alright.”

Maybe even that is wishful thinking due to the way The Accidental Husband treats the third member of its central love triangle. Colin Firth’s Richard is supposed to be one of the central obstacles for the two main protagonists to try to overcome. Problem is the writers never really establish why Emma should choose Patrick over him. Even if Patrick was far more likeable than he is, Richard doesn’t really have any disqualifying flaws.

Leap Year did something similar with its own third wheel. In that film, Adam Scott was in the Firth role, and like Richard, his Jeremy wasn’t mean or cruel or a boozer or a loser or anything like that. He was just a guy. Yet the film was well-written well enough to clearly demonstrate how Jeremy was not the right person for Anna. The Accidental Husband never does this, which further rachets down its overall stakes.

Finally, Firth’s performance also doesn’t make it particularly easy to want to see Emma and Patrick together, either. The actor is simply far too likeable in these types of roles and has always excelled at playing boring. If you want evidence, all you have to do is watch one of the great Christmas movies of our time, Love Actually. As like Richard, Firth’s character in that film, Jaime, isn’t an especially deep or dynamic character. The actor is still able to project a magnetic likability in the part. I challenge anyone to watch that film, especially the scene when he tips into a lake sideways off a dock (for literally no reason), and not want his character to succeed.

It is said that the heart wants what it wants for “reasons which reason knows nothing of.” The Accidental Husband embodies this principle, just not in a good way. The film is operating with one of the most well-known storytelling templates out there. But even though it just needs to fill in the dots, it can never make a compelling or reasoned argument for why we should be invested in Emma and Patrick either as individuals or as a couple. It is a fatal flaw at the heart of its story. And it mars the film so badly you’re left wondering not what Emma will do but why you should even care.