I just watched Swinging With the Finkels from Redbox. I wanted some brainless fun for a night with a migraine.
20 minutes in and I was already wondering when this movie was going to end.
40 minutes in, and I feel as though I was extremely patient to wait that long, I began skipping ahead, watching a minute or two, and skipping again. I saw maybe 10 minutes out of the last half of the movie.
By and far Martin Freeman was the best thing in this movie, and certainly the best actor, and he didn't even seem very great. If I had never seen anyone in this movie before I'd think they were all terrible actors. As it is I've seen Freeman on a comedy show, on Sherlock, and in The Hobbit. I know he's a good actor because I've seen it. It's almost amazing that the director/producer could actually make everyone seem that bad.
It was like they tried to play the movie strait-funny. Funny but the characters aren't in on it (eg. Stranger than Fiction). Except they failed.
Freeman's comedic timing was the best, he was also the only one with any nuance to his tone or expression. Nothing necessarily wrong with Mandy Moore, though apparently she isn't very good at fake crying.
Also, the Americans in England made it weird.
And, breaking it up into [unrelated] chapters also made it weird. Changing the narrators between the beginning and end made it weird.
The dialogue. It was like Senfeld and Gilmore Girls had a dialogue baby.
It wasn't funny; I think I laughed twice.
Nearly every scene felt incredibly...contrived (eg. the opening. Really? What on earth was the point of the market?)
The movie was just so bad. It had a hilarious premise but it was just so bad and so badly executed I couldn't even finish watching.
If this is a chick flick I'm not a chick (maybe it's not, I'm not entirely sure what it is, but it's romantic comedy only in the Shakespearean meaning of "comedy" as a story where all turns out well in the end and the romance is a fizzle at best), and I'm still puzzling over how this movie received its R rating.
Do yourself a favor, skip this movie. It's not even brainless fun.
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