A Hollywood hotshot tries again
with the Jersey girl who rejected him in his high school nerd phase. A
quasi-romantic comedy that isn’t much as romance but has some funny moments,
particularly from Anna Faris as a bimbo-singer-songwriter.
This was a pleasant surprise, a
relatively unheralded comedy about a formerly insecure fat kid (bland-some Ryan
Reynolds) who returns to his New Jersey hometown and tries to escape the
“friend zone” with the object of his high-school desires (Amy Smart). Having
meanwhile become a Hollywood hotshot/babe magnet, he gets waylaid in Jersey
while chaperoning a singer (Anna Faris, who also costarred with Reynolds in
this year’s Waiting). Faris is a pastiche of Ashlee Simpson, Courtney
Love, and Paris Hilton, which, gruesome as that sounds, was fairly comical. I
think I wanted her to end up with Reynolds because the chemistry with Smart
isn’t there. Which is to say, this is a decent comedy but not much of a
romantic comedy. It’s more like a Farrelly Brothers version of Garden State,
a shallower version, but funnier than recent Farrelly movies like Shallow
Hal or Stuck on You. (Director Roger Kumble, who previously helmed
the sickly Sweetest Thing, is a Farrelly pal.) A bit more of her point
of view, or a single transition scene between then and now, would have helped,
dramatically speaking. Or maybe that would have heightened the unreality of
what’s basically a nerd wish-fulfillment fantasy. I did like the way Reynolds
slowly reverts back to his old self as he interacts with his brother and his
old classmates, and the way, once it provides the predictable ending, it just
ends.
circulated online 12/1/05 and posted 9/20/13
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