FINDING AMANDA (2008)

TITLE
Finding Amanda

STARRING
Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli, Steve Coogan

COMPARABLE TO...
All I Want, Excess Baggage

THE JIST
Taylor Peters (Broderick) has seen better days, personally and professionally. A compulsive gambler and soon-to-be has been in the world of sitcom writers, his relationship with his wife (Tierney) is equally stressed. To leverage some favor with his wife, and because his adventure would take him to heaven on Earth - Las Vegas, Peters agrees to go round-up his niece, Amanda, and take her to rehab. It's been years since they've seen each other and on the outside Amanda appears to be a free spirit with capitalistic qualities. She's also dancer of the exotic variety, whose line of work keeps her abusive boyfriend in the best of goods. As they reconnect and compare notes on their varieties of dysfunctionalties, the Vegas backdrop provides for some winning and losing scenarios.

WOULD I SUGGEST IT TO OTHERS?
This was hardly a favorite, even the description on DVD case read more interestingly than this film played out. There were moments, both brief and fleeting, of entertaining quips between the protagonist and his niece. In general, it was a relatively unremarkable movie. Peter Tolan, who both wrote and directed Finding Amanda certainly did not channel some of the savant from his earlier works. For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed Stealing Harvard and just recently watched it all over again. The series Rescue Me was also enjoyable. The last ten minutes of the film were quite redeeming, but simply not enough to endure the rest of this flop.

MORE INFORMATION
IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889134/
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Amanda