Punch-Drunk Love (15)<br></br>Two Weeks Notice(12A)

My unfunny valentine

There is no use trying to second-guess a Paul Thomas Anderson picture. Like the frogs that rained down at the end of his previous movie, Magnolia, his new one, Punch-Drunk Love, is mined with jack-in-the-box surprises and booby traps. Early on, the camera surveys a beautiful pearly pink dawn spreading over a quiet road in the San Fernando Valley; then the calm is suddenly shattered by a truck jackknifing across the screen and skidding out of view. Seconds later, a car stops, deposits a harmonium on the kerb and drives on. Nothing more is seen of that road accident, but the harmonium does play a part, wheezing eerily through the film's soundtrack.

A bemused witness to all this is Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), who is already on close terms with peculiarity. The royal-blue suit he wears doesn't seem to belong in the warehouse store that he supervises, and the merchandise he sells – novelty toilet- plungers – isn't exactly run of the mill, either. Barry is a social misfit, uneasy with strangers and rather put upon by his swarm of sisters; he tries to present a countenance of mild amiability to the world, but privately he's in tumult, crying for no reason and exploding into sudden, wall-punching rages. He shyly confides to his brother-in-law one evening that he is contemplating therapy: "I don't like myself sometimes," he explains.

That it is Adam Sandler uttering this line prompted from me an inward cheer. Join the queue, pal! Some of my bleakest hours in the cinema have been wasted on this man's idiot brand of schmaltz and slapstick – The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Little Nicky, Mr Deeds, the titles toll like a penance. The rumour attending Punch-Drunk Love was that Paul Thomas Anderson had written the role especially for Sandler, and that it would explore a darker side to his goof-ball antics. Up to a point, it does. During a family get-together, for instance, his sisters tease him about the way they had once called him "gay boy", and Barry, seized by some inner fury, kicks through a couple of plate-glass windows.

How dangerous is he? Barry contacts a phone-sex company one evening, and next day finds himself on the end of some pretty serious blackmail: his initial response is to meekly comply. It coincides with his meeting a young woman named Lena (Emily Watson), but her attentions appear to bring out all that is volatile in him. Anderson conveys this principally through music, cranking up Jon Brion's turbulently percussive soundtrack so loud that at times it is competing with the dialogue. If that's the volume inside Barry's head, no wonder he seems to be going nuts. "I don't freak out very often," he assures Lena, following his latest wobbly, when he wrecks the men's room in a restaurant.

What feels most unstable is the film's apparent status as a romantic comedy. Granted, it has the basic ingredient of boy-meets-girl, and a pairing of actors whose unlikely attraction could be its wild card. Unfortunately, Anderson focuses so intently on the unlikeliness – Sandler's stressed-out hysterics, Watson's bafflement – that the prospect of romance becomes simply outlandish. When Barry and Lena finally manage to get away to Hawaii, their passionate avowals run thus: "I wanna chew your face and suck out your eyes" (from her); "I wanna take a hammer to your face and smash it" (from him). Is this her ingenious attempt to reconcile his feelings of love and rage? Or an admission that love is a form of madness? Either way, it will not be making an entry into anyone's Anthology of Romantic Movie Repartee.

The film's stumbling, disjointed rhythm may be analogous to Barry's stumbling, disjointed life, but its effect is to leave one feeling stranded from the action. There seems to be no internal logic driving it along; at times, it comes on with the headlong insistence of a dream, at others with the humdrum steadiness of realism. Fragments of a plot keep bobbing in and out of view – Barry is buying up stocks of Healthy Choice puddings to earn himself over a million free air-miles, even though he has never been on a plane before, while somewhere in Utah, a sleazeball opportunist (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is planning to extort him. Yet there is no satisfactory follow-through to any of this. Everything seems to happen in a vacuum. Anderson handled much larger casts in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and still managed to suggest the interconnection of characters – if they were symphonies, Punch-Drunk Love is all cacophony. And not much fun.

The Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy, Two Weeks Notice, is a spiffier and squarer vehicle than Punch-Drunk Love – a Volvo rather than a VW – but not a great deal better as a Valentine's night out. She is a Brooklyn lawyer who wants to save her local community centre; he a playboy tycoon whose company wants to knock it down for redevelopment. Somehow, she is persuaded to join his staff, initially as his divorce lawyer, graduating to his clothes consultant, adviser and, finally, secret admirer.

The writer-director Marc Lawrence at least improves on his previous ventures with Bullock (Forces of Nature and Miss Congeniality), and gets a dependably decent performance from Grant, who pitches his character somewhere between the bumbling toff of old and the more devilish persona he cultivated in Bridget Jones and About A Boy. Bravo for Hugh, not so for Sandra. She, too, mines a very narrow seam of ditheriness, the cute ex-cheerleader type who is a crack professional and a romantic disaster, but, unlike her co-star, can't make it "adorable". (Check the scene where, as bridesmaid, she ostentatiously abandons her friend's wedding ceremony to answer a mobile call from the boss. Adorable? It's not even forgivable.)

In one picture after another, Bullock tries to endear herself as a klutz, always falling off a chair or spilling coffee down her front, and always the same thought occurs: here is the most annoying American sweetheart since Meg Ryan.