Life or Something Like It

An up-and-coming TV news reporter (Angelina Jolie) gets a shock when a homeless street prophet (Tony Shalhoub) predicts that she’ll die in a week. Some bad movies make you mad; others, like this one, just make you sad. The preview trailer may be intriguing, even tantalizing, but the film it advertises is a shapeless, miserable mess that no one can make work—not the actors (including Edward Burns, Stockard Channing, James Gammon, and Melissa Errico) and certainly not director Stephen Herek, a genial hack always at the mercy of his scripts. This one (by John Scott Shepherd and Dana Stevens) is a junkyard of recycled remnants from romantic comedies, sibling-rivalry soap operas, and meaning-of-life dramas. The generic, meaningless title notwithstanding, this isn’t Life or Anything Like It.