I LOVE TROUBLE (Directed by Charles Shyer. Starring Julia Roberts, Nick Nolte, Saul Rubinek, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn)

Julia Roberts is not just the most popular female star of the moment, but the biggest female star in a decade. Obviously somebody adores her, but the way cameramen and directors pander to their tastes verges on the obsequious. In I Love Trouble she gets what is becoming her standard introduction: music swells, camera pans lovingly up her legs in slow motion, lights caress her perfect skin as she arrives improbably overdressed onto the scene. Perhaps the film should have been called I Love Julia. Or even I Love Myself, since it is a vehicle she developed and hand picked her leading man for.

The love interest in question is Nick Nolte, and he makes you wonder about Julia’s tastes. You could say he’s-no-Cary-Grant about virtually every leading man in modern cinema, but Nolte’s not even a Hugh Grant. He comes from the Robert Mitchum, hit-by-a-truck school of leading men, with life etched in the kind of facial grooves no make-up artist could cover up. You can actually see his discoloured drink and drug-abuser skin beneath the fake tan. Although he is supposed to be the kind of smooth-talking dream-boat women (in movies like this anyway) fall at the feet of, he looks more like a disgruntled, hard-drinking ex-footballer. When Julia talks back to him, you half expect him to put her over his knee and give her a good spanking. He is old enough to be her father, after all.

Nolte is still the best thing in the light, screwball comic thriller, mining a grizzled line of humour against Roberts obnoxiously incessant brightness, as if he only accepted the role begrudgingly and he’ll be damned if he’ll join Julia’s fan club. When Nolte comments, “There’s something about you...” Roberts replies “Irritating, aren’t I?”, which about sums up my feelings. She plays superbright as usual, a sassy cub-reporter sparring with Nolte’s newspaper veteran as they pursue an increasingly life-threatening story for rival newspapers. “I’m your competition, not your girl Friday,” she drawls at Nolte, but the obvious reference to the cinema’s greatest newspaper comedy (His Girl Friday to the uninitiated) is only self defeating, since one is compelled to agree. Roberts has neither the dialogue nor the uncompromising fierceness to hold to a candle to Rosalind Russell.

Writer-producer Nancy Meyers and writer-director Charles Shyer are the same duo responsible for Baby Boom and Father of the Bride, and I Love Trouble is a similar confection, ambling along on star power, big production values and vaguely witty dialogue. I Love Trouble is a movie it’s hard to actually hate but nobody could really love, a feel good film that just feels too good about itself, and a little too impressed with its star. If Julia Roberts intends to join the Hollywood greats she had better find something she can really sink her teeth into - and I’m not talking about Nick Nolte’s beer gut.