HUGH Grant and Sandra Bullock bubble with biology in their Anglo-American chemistry, on screen and, judging by their every playful interview, off it too.

They first met up in New York five years ago to discuss making movies together, and this week they have chimed in unison about how they would love to do another film. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they, but they have a point, as long as they don't play so disappointingly safe next time.

Grant, the old-fashioned English gent incomplete without a tie, and Bullock, Hollywood's equally genial but more feisty queen of romantic comedy, are a natural comic partnership, but they need brighter material than this tale of self-absorbed-and-selfless opposites finally realising that love-hate actually means love-love. They require sharp, not merely kooky.

Reuniting with writer and director Marc Lawrence after the oh-no Forces Of Nature and so-so Miss Congeniality, Bullock plays Brooklyn-born, Harvard-educated, forever-campaigning environmentalist attorney Lucy Kelson. She accepts the invitation of damnably charming playboy George Wade (Hugh do you think?) to be his lawyer in exchange for trying to make his real-estate development corporation more environmentally friendly. Yet George's big brother (David Haig) holds the purse strings, and Kelson soon finds herself influencing only George's choice of tie.

So she hands in her two weeks' notice, recommending George to get June Carter (Alicia Witt) as her hot young replacement, and that is the last time director Lawrence takes notice of the time limit that should have given his movie its impetus and more emotional clout.

Two Weeks Notice has it too easy, too smooth, and taking $100 million at the US box office is not confirmation that Lawrence got it right but merely proof that cinema audiences like the idea of a Grant-Bullock comedy axis.

Give them more than froth and nothing but froth because they are old hands at such light comedies. That experience means they could do much more than play to their stereotypes of Grant the loveable, if feckless, twittering charmer and Bullock's riff on the sparky yet clumsy manner of a Sixties' Barbra Streisand.

For all their comic timing, too much humour here carries two weeks' notice.

Updated: 11:33 Friday, February 07, 2003