Director Andy Tennant should have asked for a full rewrite on "Fools Rush In." Whoever is responsible for the story and screenplay--the producers Anna Maria Davis and Doug Draizin (whose own romance was seminal to this picture) or writers Joan Taylor and Katherine Reback--should have started at that idyll of Salma Hayek's in the Mexican backwater, because they give her character Isabel Fuentes more color and history than anything else in the movie. She is rooted in her regard for her fierce Hispanic great-grandmother and her quasi-Catholic loyalties, and it's her family that the movie should first introduce to us. <br /><br />Instead they start with workaholic WASP executive Alex Whitman in New York celebrating a recent success. They should be telling us what it is about the Big Apple that he likes so much that he'd have a hard time parting with it and moving to Las Vegas to please his determined wife, but it doesn't. They make Alex do it, because he believes it's the right thing, but that leaves very little for him to do but follow Isabel's lead.<br /><br />Matthew Perry seems whipped throughout, and the comedy here is on a Grade-B sitcom level. The comedy should have been dropped for a treatment that pointed to the tension between the two cultures caused by them trying to peacefully co-exist. Rather than hauling baseball bats and brandishing firearms for laughs, seeing the two families squirming to get along might have given this picture more depth, something only Anne Betancourt as Isabel's mother manages to provide.<br /><br />There are times when Isabel's choices call into question her judgment, one of them being why she'd pick Alex over her ex-boyfriend Chuy, when he is being played by dark, confident Carlos Gomez. Isabel is not submissive like her mother, so it's logical that she'd pick a man whose fire doesn't conflict with hers. But can she really have much respect for Alex, when she's leading him around like a puppy dog? I think not. And by the time they reunite in the pouring rain over Hoover Dam and marry on some bluff overlooking a pale Grand Canyon, you wonder if this New Age version of happily ever-after is just another divorce waiting to happen.<br /><br />A young John Bennett Perry could have filled the part of Alex amply, but at his present age, he is relegated to playing Alex's dad, and his wife is Jill Clayburgh who in the few minutes that she's on looks like she's wondering what possessed her to say yes to this movie.