Starring: Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore, Haley Bennett.

Director: Marc Lawrence.

Certificate: 12A.

WELL, here's a shock! Hugh Grant starring as a likeable chump in a lightweight romantic comedy - who would ever have expected such a thing?

I wonder if he ends up getting the girl...

Actually Music And Lyrics isn't that bad at all, especially if all you happen to want from a film is an amiable way of passing a couple of hours without taking your brain out of cruise control.

Grant plays a washed-up eighties pop star called Alex Fletcher who's reduced to playing at US county fairs, high-school reunions and the like to women of a certain age who recall him in his George Michael-esque heyday.

Then he gets a chance of career redemption.

Pop-moppet

All he has to do is to write and record a duet with pop-moppet Cora Corman (Haley Bennett) - but he can't actually write lyrics.

By a strange coincidence, the dippy plant lady Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) who's temporarily looking after the greenery in his rather palatial New York pad can - would you believe it? - write lyrics.

She's on the rebound from a disastrous relationship with her literature professor, Sloan Cates (Campbell Scott), and is reluctant to enter into any other sort of emotional bond, while he's always been commitment-phobic.

Clearly, they're destined to end up with each other but, as this is a romantic comedy and there are rules to play by, all sorts of mishaps bedevil them making beautiful music together, not least the sort of sub-Britney din favoured by Cora, on whom both their futures depend.

But the key words here are "romantic comedy" and "Hugh Grant", the highly-commercial combination of which has sold lesser products than Music And Lyrics.

What do you think? Have your say.