It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

It's true this comes across as dead slow at first perhaps because it's trying to do too many things. The cop and other 'action' is only a side show in a film where this intriguing premise is explored by two great actors. Such a thing could and probably has happened. Maybe the dialogue seems flabby in places too but overall I thought this did very well as mature romance. The protagonists seem wooden because they are doing 'shocked and mortified' so just give them a break! Give it some time and the big picture might grab you as it did me. It's such a serious movie! That's OK. It seems more like a French movie or a Tolstoy yarn with quite a depth. I doubt it was a box office hit - its too good. There's an irony in that the director plays a campaign manager who fails to make his protégé a public success. No bunting and ticker tape, but a clever, warm yet ambivalent ending. A slow burner.

Although I usually like Harrison Ford and late director Sydney Pollack;s work, "Random Hearts" is a dud and a mess. It is all over the place in story and in acting/directing. There is a pointless subplot with Ford's characters Internal Affairs that eats up a good 25 min of superfluous runtime. The low-point though is the supposed morbid romance/relationship that's born out of bereavement. While this might not be uncommon, Ford and Thomas have next to no chemistry, and the strange obsessions with the mystery of the affair wears out quickly. A young Kate Mara is little more than plot device and filler. Towards the beginning the direction and performance for Ford is whacky and eccentric all of the sudden turning morose. The final scene was atrocious too - trying to bow-tie the movie. 4/10 not recommended.

Without actually having read any of the reviews (except Ebert's), I think I can understand why it would rate so low - it fails as a movie. Kind of. It makes a half-hearted attempt to have a plot and to have plot mechanics and so on. And just doesn't care at all about any of that stuff, and eventually it all just fades away to nothing. Because the filmmakers don't care at all about the cop's case or his career, any more than they care about the congresswoman's career or her race for re- election, or her relationship with her daughter, or even how each of these people grieves over the loss of their spouses or the betrayal. No, the movie's not about any of that, yet that takes up a good portion of it - so it makes sense that a lot of people would go thumbs down on this.And yet - the movie is really good, if you focus just on what the movie itself cared about in itself, and what it was about at heart. And that is, simply, the two leads, and their relationship. And that's it. The rest of the movie doesn't matter at all to the people making it. But that's OK, because - Ford and Scott Thomas are amazing in this. And have amazing chemistry. And are amazingly written. We love the relationship, we really love the two people in it. We want them to end up together (I won't say if they do or not). Badly. And all the rest is just stuff to justify getting them from point A to point B and having the relationship happen and take the steps it needs to take - and that INCLUDES the entire 'premise' of the film itself, including the plane crash and the situation that opens it. So. As I say, I can see why this would get a fail grade. But it's so involving and the good in it is so good - we care so much about what the filmmakers cared about in the movie - that I can recommend it and could imagine watching it again at some point. Even if only for Kristin Scott Thomas's beautiful face with those big puppy dog eyes that are just - so open and emotional. You can fall in love with her, watching this, much moreso than in The English Patient. Her character here is extremely endearing and adorable - two words I've never used to describe any politician, fictional or otherwise. So perhaps she was miscast. But yea. A lovely woman playing a character you could imagine falling in love with (and do fall in love with, watching the movie), being hurt and having a disaster befall her, being vulnerable, and then meeting and falling for as likable and respectable and endearing a MALE performer as we've ever seen on screen. It's a recipe for success and despite the failed movie surrounding it, I think it was a success.Also of note - film features a young Kate "Never Quite Famous" Mara in an early role as the congresswoman's daughter. And there's a late scene of plot movement where a subplot crashes hilariously into the main story, in a way that momentarily threatened to be the most ludicrous such subplot intrusion in the history of cinema (narrowly averted, as she didn't take the bullet, thank God).Is the movie plausible, psychologically? No. It's absurd, psychologically. My OnDemand deal had Peter Weir's (brilliant) "Fearless" as a similar film to this. And superficially, in some plot details, yea I guess they are similar. But the films are nothing at all alike, nor are they about anything similar. The one line towards the end where Scott Thomas tells the press how the cop had been her friend, seen her thru a tough time when she needed it, how they were 'survivors' - all that rings completely hollow and doesn't match the film, which simply depicts a romance. The thing Scott Thomas is talking about at the end there would match the Rosie Perez/Jeff Bridges relationship in Fearless, which was indeed about two survivors of a tragedy using each other's company to cope (or not cope) with a trauma they'd both experienced. But this film isn't about trauma. It sidesteps all of that very quickly and is simply about a romance that, if freed from the requirements of psychological plausibility and the plot, is quite good. So. If you still are interested in seeing a nice and involving romance, despite all those many caveats - check it out.

Okay, Billy Wilder got their first with Avanti in which Jack Lemmon and Juliette Mills journey to Ischia to claim the respective bodies of his father and her mother who have been killed in a road accident, only to discover that they have been meeting on the island for years clandestinely. They start out as antagonists and end up in the sack, natch. Here Sydney Pollack puts a little spin on it inasmuch as Ford and Scott Thomas are not on a vacation island thousands of miles from home when - in this case - their spouses rather than parents - fail to survive a plane crash. Pollack also allows us to see both Ford and Scott Thomas at work whereas Lemmon on Mills had left their day jobs behind. Still there are enough similarities for plagiarism to rear its ugly head, so what else is knew. This eluded me on release and I found a Russian version in a Thrift Shop, recognized Scott Thomas on the box, know she always delivers so took it home. I was pleasantly surprised, especially after reading the first few pans here on IMDb. Scott Thomas was good as ever and a tad warmer than she often plays and works well with Ford who probably was, as someone remarked, a touch old for the role. Overall I enjoyed it and may well give it another whirl in a year or so.