Starring Mandy Moore, Jeremy Piven.
Written by Derek Guiley, David Schneiderman. Directed by Andy Cadiff.
(PG) 111 min. Opens Jan 9.
The thoroughly unremarkable Chasing
Liberty makes it three negligible movies in a row for Mandy
Moore, the pouty pop starlet with designs on crossover success. But
at least this time out she's allowed to have some fun —
neither A Walk to Remember, in which she played a
cancer-stricken Baptist, nor the similarly downbeat family drama How
to Deal, offered her much in the way of levity.
This time out, she plays Anna Foster, a
well-scrubbed society girl whose father (Mark Harmon) happens to be
the president of the United States. As such, she doesn't get
out much, since her few attempts at dating are scuttled by the
conspicuous presence of her bodyguards. Sad, overprotected Anna just
wants to live, damn it, so when her family is summoned to Prague for
diplomatic business, she takes the opportunity to dress down, act
out, and give the slip to her security detail. But Daddy is one step
ahead: he's commissioned an undercover operative, Ben (Matthew
Goode), to spirit Anna around Europe while maintaining her illusions
of independence.
That the agent happens to be a hottie
with a British accent is a given, as are the tortuous
misunderstandings attending their heavy petting. (He likes her, but
can't tell her he's on duty; she thinks she's being
rejected.) Their budding relationship is overshadowed by the flirty
bickering of real actors Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra, slumming
it as a pair of Secret Service agents trailing the pair through
Europe. They believe that Ben has gone AWOL and has secretly married
Anna.
It's a good thing they're
in the movie, because Anna and Ben become boring despite their
exquisitely matched cheekbones, mostly due to Moore's oddly
pitched performance. Moore looks terrific, but she can't quite
navigate the dramatic terrain between adolescent empowerment and
shallow brattiness. What's more, the script's attempts at
giving her an edge — drinking underage, swimming nude in a
Czech harbour and blithely (and nakedly) offering up her virginity
after an extended first date — come off as confusing teases in
a PG-rated film.