Matthew Broderick is Sam, a small-town astronomer. Kelly Preston is Linda, his childhood sweetheart. Every day at noon, Sam lowers the telescope in his observatory to gaze into the schoolyard where Linda teaches. Every noon, she waves to the dome on the hill. Nothing could be rosier.

But Linda longs to roam. When she takes a temporary teaching assignment in New York City, Sam soon learns she does not intend to return. He flies to New York to win her back, only to discover she's tucked into a Soho love nest with a French restaurateur.

So what's a jilted astronomer to do? He crawls into the abandoned building directly across the street from their loft, sets up a pile of optical equipment to observe their movements and waits for the infatuation to fade so he can take his soulmate home.

By the time I had reached this point in ADDICTED TO LOVE, I was having serious problems with my suspension of disbelief. Would an apparently normal person like Sam so easily adopt the habits of a stalker? Is it really that easy to come to New York and squat? What are the chances of finding an abandoned building so ideally located, in which the electricity still works and no-one -- not a landlord, not a vagrant, not a cop -- happens by for weeks on end? And perhaps I missed something at the very beginning of the film, but was Sam making observations of a distant galaxy through an optical telescope *in broad daylight*?

Things didn't improve much when Sam gained a roommate -- Maggie, a tough-chick photographer played Meg Ryan. Maggie decides Sam's roost is the perfect spot to hatch a revenge plot against her ex-fiancee, Anton -- the French restaurateur who dumped her for Linda.

For the first third of the movie, Maggie seemed nothing more than Meg Ryan with too much eye-liner and an attitude. Sam, on the other hand, is such a nothing character, spouting lines like "I won't be sucked into your twisted nightmare," no effort was required to portray him. Thus, Matthew Broderick's performance seemed less forced by comparison. But neither were convincing.

Fortunately, ADDICTED TO LOVE took off, slowly, awkwardly, like an albatross. Maggie becomes more real and her inevitable romance with Sam is bumpy yet warm enough to feel genuine. Her vengeful schemes push the film's humor toward farce. It's undeniably fun to watch the overconfident Anton twist as ludicrous events -- such as a mob of kids armed with squirt guns -- rob him of all he holds dear.

By the end of the movie, I had laughed enough that I didn't even think about the about the rap sheet Maggie and Sam would have if anyone ever bothered to press charges against them. ADDICTED TO LOVE shunts legal and logical issues aside, instead putting the emotional houses in proper, predictable order and dealing a closing pair of lines that I just loved.

I should mention that the best performance probably belongs to Tcheky Karyo who plays Anton. He's an antagonist, to be sure, but of all the characters, his grows the most. When Maggie finally achieves her goal of reducing him to "a quivering stain on the floor," he is both convincing and touching.

I *loved* Kelly Preston in JERRY MAGUIRE as Jerry's fiery fiancee. She attacked that role with as much gusto as Cuba Gooding, Jr. took on his. As Linda in ADDICTED TO LOVE, she's merely the object of Sam's desires. She's beautiful, innocent-looking -- and little else. I'm not disappointed in her, just in the small, unchallenging role she had.

Interesting production note: Robert Newmyer and Jeffrey Silver produced ADDICTED TO LOVE. They had intended it to be the second production for their company, Outlaw Productions. Their first production? SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE. Kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

ADDICTED TO LOVE can be silly, predictable and far-fetched. It can also be genuinely warm and hilarious. See it if you have something funnier and more romantic in mind for this weekend than being chased by dinosaurs.

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