Starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. Rated PG. Opens Friday, January 8

There are ways to entertain yourself during the desperately awful romantic comedy Leap Year. Because the movie is mostly set in Ireland, instead of slitting your wrists in the theatre and making a bloody mess, try imagining cute Irish ways you could die rather than continue watching. For instance, you could choose to be eaten alive by zombie leprechauns rather than watch Leap Year. Or, better fun, volunteer to be rhythmically stomped to death by members of Riverdance.

Incidentally, did somebody hit the actors and director Anand Tucker over the head with a large rubber mallet to get them to do this? The usually intelligent Amy Adams plays Anna, a Boston real-estate stager or house fluffer or whatever who’s also a whiny, charmless nitwit. When Anna’s smug, soulless cardiologist boyfriend, Jeremy (Adam Scott), doesn’t cough up a marriage proposal so they can have a horrible, hollow life together, she decides she’ll track him to a conference in Dublin and—thanks to some mouldy Irish tradition—propose to him on leap day.

Here’s where screenwriting duo Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont (Josie and the Pussycats and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas—exactly) maybe thought they were making It Happened One Night instead of an IQ–siphoning low in moronic chick flickness. Anal-retentive Anna ends up on a road trip of stupid, predictable misadventures across Ireland with sarcastic, unshaven, apparently masochistic bartender Declan (Matthew Goode, not bad, considering).

They spar: check! Randy old folk think they’re married and encourage them to knock boots: check! Anna falls in mud and cow turds: check! There’s jaunty, fiddly music to further damage your brain: check! You know exactly how this hackneyed facsimile of a romantic comedy ends: check! And the final bit of diabolical blarney? This isn’t even a leap year.