“13 Going On 30” works on the same level as many other great romantic comedies such as “While You Were Sleeping” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” as it has a wonderful innocent tone. The film is effectively a female version of “Big” but while I like that movie, I found this film to be more amusing and more endearing.

Jenna Rink is 13 and just wants to be popular and with the help of some ‘wishing dust’, becomes herself at age 30 (Jennifer Garner “Elektra”, “DareDevil”). She now works at the fashion magazine she read as a child and has an ice hockey star boyfriend but she’s lost touch with her old best friend (Mark Ruffalo “Spotlight”, “Avengers Assemble”).

Jennifer Garner is able to channel the same likeable personality as Sandra Bullock (“While You Were Sleeping”). Like Bullock, Garner is not just visually attractive but has a winning personality and she’s great fun to watch in this movie. Mark Ruffalo gives his usual understated performance but it works here and we don’t feel very sympathetic towards him for the way he’s been treated. Garner and Ruffalo work very well together and their chemistry is very good. The other characters are okay but they don’t really need to be anything special.

“13 Going On 30” is a silly and light-hearted movie but I am very fond of romantic comedies that can make it work because there are so many that do not work and become very tedious. So many romantic comedies fail to get us to care about the characters and their situations so it’s always great to see a movie that gets it right. There are lots of amusing scenes in here such as one where Jenna accidentally chats up the wrong person and the dance scene is pretty good too. Like “Groundhog Day”, this a romantic comedy with a little flavour of fantasy and it works wonderfully.