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Perhaps the biggest shock in this easy-going, formulaic feel-good movie about American wineries beating out the snobby French in a 1976 blind tasting is how much of it is true. Surely, the lawyer-turned-vintner Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his long-haired hippie son Bo (Chris Pine), who together run Napa’s Chateau Montelena, are Hollywood fabrications. Nope, that’s true. How about imperious British wine snob Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), who promotes the Franco-American blind tasting as a publicity stunt? Real. The Barretts’ Chardonnay turning brown due to oxidation on the eve of the tasting? True, dammit, true.

It’s rather inspiring, frankly, that life can offer up so many hackneyed movie clichés. It gives us hope that love might really conquer all, bombs might really be defused by cutting the red wire and we might actually have as-yet-undiscovered superpowers.

But we digress, mostly because this absolutely average film left our minds free to do a bit of wandering. Obstacles are encountered and dispatched at nicely spread intervals, the British and French are mocked for pretension, and America finally puts an end to the French reign of terroir. In wine terms, Bottle Shock is a perfectly adequate vin de table. Hank Sartin

From Time Out Chicago

Dir Randall Miller, Not yet rated, 110 mins, Opens Thursday 18