Sadly, I have to highlight Captain America himself, Chris Evans, for the alleged romantic comedy Playing It Cool, which I call alleged due to this being neither one of those two categories.
Evans plays a screenwriter with no name(seriously, he is never called by name by anyone and the same goes for his love interest, which I'll get to in a moment) who has to finish punching up a romcom screenplay before he can work on the action film that he's more interested in.
Evans gets pressured by his agent(Anthony Mackie, aka The Falcon) to hurry up, with promises of getting to go on location to pick up attractive women and yes, I'm being polite here. Let's just say his descriptions are gross on the level of a 80's sex comedy and leave it at that.
Anyway, Evans mopes around, reading trashy magazine articles as research because his history of bad relationships makes it hard for him to write about love. First off, shouldn't a screenwriter watch a few movies set in this genre instead? Hell, TCM alone has plenty of classic material to inspire a decent script!
During his moping, Evans goes to an event with one of his buddies(Topher Grace) and winds up meeting a mystery woman(Michelle Monaghan) that he's instantly attracted to. No, she also has no name either and you would think that a first meet would be the time to introduce yourself, right? Well, they hit it off and for some reason, decide to have fun by randomly hitting on older people at the party. This is supposed to be cute and funny but it comes off as really weird and mean instead:
In addition to endless narration(Sorry, Chris Evans but even you can't make boring cliches sound interesting), there's also bits where our leading man imagines himself as the main character in other people's stories, which gets amazingly awkward when one of his friends relates a plot line from a K-drama!
At one point, Evans talks to his grandfather(who conveniently dies later on so that he can find Meaning in Life and Love) who takes a break from calling him a term related to a cat to tell the "how I met your grandmother" tale that a)Evans and Monaghan pop up in as the leads and b) turns into an actual cartoon about WWII, which had me wondering if I was watching a bad episode of Adult Swim!
In between his attempts to woo Monaghan, Evans hangs out in weird places(a gun range and then a bowling alley straight out of The Big Lebowski) to consult with the motley crew that make up his friends such as Grace, who is also a screenwriter that leaves copies of Love in the Time of Cholera in random spots, claiming that it's his "art." How the hell is someone else's book YOUR art?! Granted, Evans calls him on that at a later time but Grace's argument seems to be somehow justified nonetheless.
Along with Grace, Evans hangs out with Aubrey Plaza,who sounds like she's intentionally over enunciating her lines and Luke Wilson, who enjoys giving crappy advice. By the way, these characters do have names but I don't care to give them. Trust me, they're not worth knowing:
The dialogue itself is so mind numbing that I found myself wishing I was watching a Lifetime made for TV movie instead. At least those movie have memorably bad lines!
Given the number of reasonably well known actors that pop up in this dismal film such as Patrick Warburton, Beverly D'Angelo(very briefly) and SNL's Kyle Mooney, I'm guessing that the writers and/or the director were pretty well connected to get this movie off the ground but also given the fact that this dull as dirt clunker was shelved for a couple of years, their considerable clout ran out once someone who was not their friend took a good look at the end results!
For one thing, it's hard to sympathize with Evans' plight as he is pursuing a woman who is seeing someone else and the little that we see of the other guy, his only fault seems to be that he's not as cool as Evans:
Yet that revelation clicks with our leading man because his mother left him as a child with a goodbye note attached to his favorite cereal and after hooking with Monaghan , Evans can eat Captain Crunch again. That just leaves a weirdly unpleasant taste in my mouth, sort of like peanut butter and sushi.
Anyhow, the rest of the movie falls into the usual cliche pit, complete with racing through the city to stop Monaghan from Marrying The Wrong Guy and I swear, for a hour and a half long film, this whole end bit felt longer than a Ken Burns miniseries!
Well, hopefully the next installment in Avengers:FilmFail is not as torturous as we join Robert Downey, Jr. on his road trip with Zach Galiafinakis in Due Date. We shall see,folks, but my expectations are lower than before after watching this moanworthy mess:
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