"Leap Year"

Amy Adams is one of the most beguiling and engaging actresses around. Matthew Goode was born with an extra charisma gene. And the countryside and coastline of Ireland are always a banquet for the eyes. Put these powerhouse ingredients together, and you'd naturally wind up with something irresistible, right?

Maybe if you threw in a field's worth of four-leaf clovers, something the makers of "Leap Year" apparently didn't have close at hand. Although Adams and Goode try to glide through the film on sheer amiability, they are anchored to a screenplay that undermines them practically every predictable step of the way.

The exceedingly slight story by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont steals pages from "It Happened One Night," "The Sure Thing," "Runaway Bride" and any other romantic comedy that might have happened to find its way into their Netflix queue. Anna (Adams) is a full-steam-ahead, Type-A personality who has made a career out of dressing up luxury apartments to make them sell quickly (one of her secrets is stolen directly from "Clueless"; I'll leave it to you to find out which one). For four years, Anna's been seriously involved with a cardiologist named Jeremy (Adam Scott) who has yet to say those magic words and slip a sparkling stone on her finger.

So Anna decides to take the initiative herself, secretly following her man to Dublin, where she plots to take advantage of an old Irish tradition by proposing to him on Feb. 29. A series of contrivances is engineered to deliver Anna to the doorstep of a pub/inn run by Declan (Goode), who doesn't immediately warm up to the frazzled American lass, even though she's willing to pay a handsome fee for a ride to Dublin. Still, Declan needs to make some fast money to save his business from creditors so the duo hit the road together, sniping and griping at each other mile after mile.

She can't stand his devil-may-care attitude and his rattletrap car. He carps about her Louis Vuitton luggage and her $600 high heels (and does the world really need one more film in which a know-it-all sophisticate tromps into the wild in wildly inappropriate attire?). Observing it all from the sidelines are a crew of elderly, meddling Irish stereotypes whose behavior and dialogue would make even the Lucky Charms leprechaun blush in embarrassment.

Every so often, "Leap Year" manages to come up with a mildly funny moment or two, and, when they're not hurling puffball insults, Goode and Adams find a sweet tenderness in their rapport that only serves to make you wish they'd been teamed up in a better-written movie. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel's camera lingers lovingly on the craggy rock walls, castle ruins and windswept meadows of the Emerald Isle, providing a little eye candy to distract attention away from the plodding plot. Watchable but a long way from wonderful, "Leap Year" strains to kill the requisite amount of time before Anna faces that life-changing Big Decision -- and no, it's not the choice between the shepherd's pie and the cottage pie.