Main cast: Stuart Townsend (Adam), Frances O’Connor (Laura), Charlotte Bradley (Alice), Kate Hudson (Lucy), Alan Maher (David), Brendan Dempsey (Martin), Cathleen Bradley (Karen), and Rosaleen Linehan (Peggy)
Director: Gerard Stembridge

About Adam tries to rise above its Irish comedy contrivances, but fails. The whole concept – not plot – is just wrong. It’s about this seemingly handsome and perfect man Adam who gets engaged to Lucy, a kooky waitress, and then proceeds to seduce her sisters as well as her brother’s girlfriend. Even Lucy’s brother finds himself, er, affected by Adam. I am waiting for Adam to get it going on with Lucy’s mother, but the movie chickens out when it comes to that. Gah.

Stuart Townsend makes an affable, boyish, and devastatingly sexy lead – it is so easy to be seduced by him. But his role Adam is written more as a cipher or an object even rather as a person with coherent motives and personality. In the end, he’s just… weird. Likewise, Lucy is just kooky, her bookish sister Laura is just frigid, her married sister Alice is frustrated… all one-note characters with little depths under the surface.

By the way, Kate Hudson’s Irish accent is atrocious.

Told in flashbacks by each characters in this movie, except from Adam, About Adam soon degenerates into a circular repeat pattern. Yes, yes, yes, I know Adam is a cheat, a liar, a sex fiend, et cetera, but why? Why is he even attracted to this loser family? Is he that bored? And told in a cartoon manner that expects me to believe that Adam’s cheating ways have brought this family closer than ever, this one misses the satire bullseye. It isn’t biting enough to be dark comedy, and it is too timid to even acknowledge its porn-fantasy premise.