Kate & Leopold is a time-travel love story.  Leopold (Hugh Jackman) is a tall, good-looking aristocrat from the nineteenth century who goes through a time portal and ends up in the twenty-first century. He meets a woman named Kate (Meg Ryan), and befriends her brother Charlie (Brecklin Meyer), who is a funny-looking little-guy. Leopold and Charlie end up one evening at a nightclub, where they sit at a table with some beautiful women. Charlie tries his best to amuse the ladies, getting nowhere, while Leopold just sits there being the strong, silent type, whom the women are obviously attracted to. Later, as they are walking home, Leopold tells Charlie that he is a Merry Andrew, a buffoon, and that is why he gets nowhere with women.

Now, I guarantee you that if Leopold had acted like a Merry Andrew, and Charlie had just sat there being silent, it would still have been Leopold whom the women were wanting. In fact, the movie might have been more interesting had the actors switched parts. If Charlie had been tall and good looking, but was a flop with the ladies, while Leopold had been a funny-looking little-guy who succeeded with women in general, and with Kate in particular, on account of his Victorian manners and aristocratic demeanor, then that might have been interesting. Not realistic, but interesting.  As it is, the hapless Charlie, whom fate had provided a plain face and small stature, has to endure the additional insult of being told by a man both handsome and well-built that he is doing it wrong.

Because there is nothing surprising about a tall, good-looking man succeeding at love, regardless of which century he comes from, the movie ends up being routine and predictable, notwithstanding the stuff about traveling through time.