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Rebel Wilson plays the same character for about the 100th time in How to Be Single
C-The producers of How to Be Single undoubtedly are hoping that audiences will flock to see the film to get a glimpse at a new Sex and the City. What they will actually see, however, consists mostly of unformed story ideas that play like potential plot threads that got rejected in the first round of a Sex and the City brainstorming script session.
How to Be Single tells the interrelated stories of four single women in New York City. The main character is Alice (Dakota Johnson), who somewhat arbitrarily breaks up with her longtime boyfriend Josh (Nicholas Braun) and moves to the Big Apple, only to find her various new relationships equally unsatisfying. The only other remotely well-developed character is Alice’s sister, Meg (Leslie Mann), a doctor who gets artificially inseminated only to find herself attracted to Ken (Jake Lacy), a man 15 years her junior.
A movie solely about the love lives of Meg and Alice might have been fairly interesting. Mann’s storyline is by far the most interesting, and she, as usual, brightens up every scene in which she appears. Johnson’s storyline is considerably more confusing because Alice clearly doesn’t know what she wants, and, worse, the writers don’t seem to know what her character wants either until the last five minutes of the movie. To its credit, How to Be SIngle then manages to end on a fresh, somewhat surprising note. Alas, Meg and Alice aren’t the only single women in the movie. There’s Lucy (Alison Brie), whose sole purpose seems to be explaining the nuts and bolts of internet dating to the audience. An even worse character in How to Be Single is Robin, Rebel Wilson‘s umpteenth variation on the same over-sexed character. Her purpose ostensibly is to provide comic relief and show the somewhat naïve Alice around town, but the only people who will find this character amusing are those who think that the very idea of overweight women enjoying sex is hilarious. Despite a few good scenes involving Mann and Johnson, How to Be Single never comes together as a coherent, consistently funny movie. Instead, it plays like an exercise in how to fail at movie making.
Continue reading on How to Be Single: Mini-review
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