Garry Marshall's new Runaway Bride not only reprises the casting of Pretty Woman, it also repeats the formula of one of the first romantic film comedies ever made. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere play the film's title character and an unemployed journalist, the same roles as Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. There comparisons cease -- far from approaching the Frank Capra masterpiece, this bit of treacle doesn't even reproduce the meager virtues of Marshall's tawdry 1990 hit.

Here Roberts switches from ambivalence about prostitution to misgivings about that other bastion of institutionalized sex, marriage. She's Maggie Carpenter, a small-time girl with the distinction of having left three grooms hanging at the altar. Playing Mike Barnicle in his wildest dreams is Gere as Ike Graham, a columnist for USA Today desperate for an idea. A barfly tells him about Carpenter; Graham writes the story up with fabricated facts and gets fired when his subject blows the whistle. Seeking vindication, Graham shows up in Carpenter's home town on the eve of her fourth foray at marital bliss; what follows is as inevitable as it is implausible.

Actually, none of this rings true, from the quaintness of the setting (Graham compares it to Mayberry, and indeed the whole film is a boob-tube simulacrum from former TV maven Marshall) to the cutesy hate/love relationship of the two leads. And whatever chemistry the two had before has faded into caricature. Gere looks gray and bored; Roberts's lips seem to have expanded to the size of a catcher's mitt. Joan Cusack, as Maggie's best friend and the best thing in the movie, says it best: "I'm weird; you're quirky." And in this business, quirky is a synonym for phony.