NONE of the husband candidates Allie (Anna Faris) has bed-tested have matched her selection criteria. A magazine article suggests that the magic maximum is 20. Her score is 19. So if the next guy she goes with all the way isn’t Mr Right, the rest of her life is going to be unspeakably awful. What’s more, her younger sister Daisy (Ari Graynor) is about to marry, which only rubs salt into Allie’s emotional wounds.

When Allie’s firm downsizes, she’s the only one let go. She asks Colin (Chris Evans) the good-looking guy in the apartment across the hall, to apply his investigative skills to tracking down the 19 so she can review the known field.

The only others watching Mark Mylod’s rom-com were four late-teens chicks, a statistically-insignificant sample of the film’s target audience. Their responses to my enquiry matched my assessment – predictable, a bit juvenile, pretty, unconvincing.

The screenplay by Gabrielle Allen and Jennifer Crittenden presses all the buttons marked cliché. Mylod filmed it in Boston, which looked good. Farris plays Allie convincingly, which is not to say, in any way award-winning. Bette Midler lookalike Ari Graynor, as Daisy, is just okay. For me, the pick of the cast is Blythe Danner as the sisters’ socially-sensitive mother who refuses to attend the wedding because Daisy has invited her father (Ed Begley Jr) and his new trophy chick.

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