Writer(s): Amy Schumer
Starring: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, and Brie Larson, and Colin Quinn
It’s no surprise this was a critical darling: anything Judd Apatow touches is already instantaneous “gold”, while Amy Schumer is the current “it” girl of Hollywood comedies. It’s a combination that’s “too big to fail”, and I have no doubt some critics got some lean “bonuses” from the studio to ensure that positive reviews brainwashed the American public into believing this is something special. It’s not. It’s every bit as formulaic as all the other mainstream rom-coms, even down to the sudden shift in tone--from over-the-top comedy, to genuine drama—that sets up the third act. Why do movies like this always have to give us some kind of moral lesson? One moment we get a story about how a character has to dislodge a condom lodged inside her using only her finger, and the next, we’re supposed to be emotionally involved when that character—who is intentionally made to be as crass and unlikable as possible—suffers the loss of her father? Of course, stuff like this happens in all similar movies, from American Pie, who made junk like this marketable, on to its thousands of like-minded clones, and it’s every bit as pointless now as it was then; this was just used to highlight how by-the-numbers this is, no matter how many times “fuck” is said on screen.
Amy Schumer (who also wrote the screenplay) plays Amy, a woman who has commitment issues. She sleeps with a new man every night, kicks them out before morning, and is satisfied to never see them again. Her behavior, we are lead to believe, is a result of her father telling her and her sister at a very young age that monogamy is pointless and unrealistic. This is advice her sister never took this to heart, as she is now married and with a child on the way (though she already has a stepchild).
Anyway, queue all the clichés: She essentially vows to never get married, until her job requires her to interview a sports doctor (Bill Hader), who she slowly falls for despite sleeping with him on the first date, and then she ruins the doctor’s big day at an awards ceremony, so she thinks it’s over, and then starts drinking and going back to her promiscuous ways, and then he thinks it’s over, but is encouraged by his friends to try patching things up, and then they do, and then the movie ends.
The main issue is that Amy’s character is made up to be such a dick that none of this standardized formula really works. Take, for example, the obligatory scenes, briefly outlined above, where both of them “do wrong” and attempt to win each other back. The problem here, is that the sports doctor did nothing wrong—Amy consistently screws things up for him, refuses to even acknowledge her mistakes or apologize, and we’re supposed to cheer for them to be together in the end, solely out of familiarity of the subgenre and how it works. Like her character, Ms. Schumer refuses to put forth any effort to make us want to see them together; she just wills it, and relies on multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to make it so.
There are two saving graces that prevent this from being a complete disaster, and they go by the names of Lebron James, and Dave Attell. James gets the most screentime out of the two, by far, and is a surprisingly decent comedic actor. Sure, he generally relies on the cuteness and the “Hey, that’s Lebron James!” factor, at least at first, but it works, and he actually delivers a couple of humorous lines. Attell, who plays a homeless man who constantly stands outside of Amy’s apartment, is very sparingly used, but delivers Attell-style quips to passersby, to often funny results.
The rest is all miss. I have never seen Schumer’s television series, and have only witnessed short clips of her television show, so I didn’t really know what to expect going in here. On top of the constant vulgarities, the script also relies a lot on awkward silences, also a current fad in Hollywood, which tend to wear thin after being overused within the first few minutes. I think she’s a very attractive woman, and will not form a cemented opinion of her based on one project, but I honestly believe the buzz from this is a marketing attempt to push her farther up the comedy echelon, where more people stand to profit off of her. There’s just no way that anyone can honestly praise this as “different” from any other romantic comedy—like Amy’s character in the movie, it’s too afraid to commit to being anything other than standardized comedic fare, and the talents—or in Judd Apatow’s case, the overrated hype--of almost everyone involved is wasted.
If you’re a rom-com completist, you may find something to like here, though a word of caution: even my chick flick-loving wife demanded I turn it off at the 90-minute mark out of utter disgust. So we couldn’t even make it all the way through. Which brings me to the point that the only thing worse than a bad romantic comedy, is a bad romantic comedy that thinks it’s smart enough to ramble on for two hours and eight minutes.
RECAP: A piece of utter trash that’s neither as smart nor as funny as you were lead to believe. Trainwreck is so bad, it doesn’t even bare comparisons to its title—whereas trainwrecks are supposedly so horrible you can’t look away, my wife and I had the exact opposite problem, gladly turning it off just beyond the 90-minute mark. The film’s attempt to be “edgy” consists of throwing in random swear words and poorly-timed vulgarities, as it simply runs through one banal rom-com plot checkpoint after another. LeBron James, Dave Attell, and a couple humorous scenes save it from being a complete dog, but it’s even far worse than the similarly-overhyped dreck that was Knocked Up.
RATING: 1.5/10
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