This year's award for cinematically having your cupcake and eating it, too, goes to the lightly likable Isn't It Romantic? a combination romantic comedy and rom-com satire which, in attempting to parody a genre, becomes the very thing it's sending up.
The movie's high concept is a fun one: Woman who hates romantic comedies, bonked on the head, wakes in a benignly nightmarish alternative reality where she's literally living in a romantic comedy. Yet the script - a dish long in development and now boasting a number of chefs (Set It Up's Katie Silberman, the ubiquitous Dana Fox, and original writer Erin Cardillo) - doesn't entirely know what to do with that premise, beyond mining it for the most obvious of gags at our much-maligned genre's expense.
Far be it for me to snipe at a project I'm so much in accord with, since I've been bemoaning the surplus of cookie-cutter rom-coms on this blog for over a decade now. And some of the runner gags, such as a long overdue parody of The Super-Gay Best Friend (here played with evident over-the-top delight by Brandon Scott-Jones) really hit their mark. Satisfying, too, is the Groundhog Day-reminiscent repeater in which heroine Natalie (Rebel Wilson) keeps getting foiled in her attempt to have actual sex with hunk love object Blake (Liam Hemsworth), because in this rom-com world, such a scene always cuts to the morning after, with no naughty bits allowed.
But for all its affectionate jokes about the absurdity of rom-com tropes, the movie skims the surface of what could have been a deeper comedy. The stereotypical male leads who'd be seen as stalkers in our #MeToo era are missing in action, along with other substantive tropes worthy of exploration - such as the basic "love yourself first to be capable of loving someone else" theme that the movie embraces straight-facedly without question. The rom-com genre, currently still struggling to regain its bankable status, is bigger and more interesting than Isn't It's picking at low-hanging satirical fruit suggests.
This is my bone to pick with what could've been a darker, smarter satire with truly sharp teeth. In its attempt to please its demographic (the movie was released to capitalize on Valentine's Day), the script pulls its punches and ends up feeling exactly like the kind of frothy, formulaic fare that it's supposedly aiming to deconstruct. Nonetheless, if you're a Rebel Wilson fan (especially if you enjoyed seeing Wilson with Adam Devine in Pitch Perfect, as he's back with her here as The Love Interest Stuck in the Friend Zone), catch this before it goes away.
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