reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

film | The dating shame

Houston, we have a problem, and it's called FAILURE TO LAUNCH. This alleged comedy operates under the delusion that it's a bouncy screwball romance between a 35-year-old slacker (Matthew McConaughey) who still lives at home and the "professional interventionist" (Sarah Jessica Parker) his folks hire to seduce him into emptying their nest. Of course, mom (Kathy Bates) needs to stop cleaning his room and cooking his meals, and then dad (ex-footballer Terry Bradshaw) should just sit him down and explain to him that it's high time to move out, but then the film wouldn't exist, and millions of women might be deprived of the sight of the tawny McConaughey's physical-specimen-ness in a series of fitted shirts that apparently are all missing the top four buttons. I'd, however, get my 96 minutes back, and that, I think, is a pretty fair trade.

OK, so, let's see if this sounds kosher to you. As soon as McConaughey's commitment-phobic duder — "Gnarly crash!" he enthuses following a mountain-bike wipeout — tires of a girlfriend, he invites her back to his place for the night as he knows she'll bail upon the next morning's realization that his parents sleep across the hall. Parker, meanwhile, is a working girl you pay to fake-date your freeloading-bachelor son, goad him into swapping his childhood bedroom for a place of his own, and then dump him as soon as the U-Haul's unloading at his new digs. Mmmhm. We're supposed to root for these two to fall in love, but Failure to Launch fails to make either of them endearing or likable, and instead wastes time with misguided America's Funniest Home Videos-level shtick in which McConaughey is bitten by — in no particular order — a chipmunk, a dolphin, and a smirking vegetarian lizard. Later in the movie, Parker's roommate and a buddy of McConaughey's (Elf's Zooey Deschanel and National Treasure's Justin Bartha, welcome scene-stealers) encounter a pissed-off mockingbird, presumably because a dolphin, a chipmunk, a smirking vegetarian lizard, and a pissed-off mockingbird attacking the same person would be overkill.

Failure to Launch sort of realizes the questionable actions of its main characters, and it attempts to compensate by: A) cooking up a half-assed backstory to rationalize McConaughey's relationship wavering; and B) insisting that Parker never ever sleeps with her marks, but no amount of backtracking or explanation can change that he's a royal schmuck and she's an emotional prostitute. The ridiculous happy ending — what, you were expecting something grounded in reality? — acknowledges at least a kernel of truth: that these people totally deserve each other. D+

1 Comments:

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