Failure to Launch fails as decent film
Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures
Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey share a not-at-all contrived moment in their latest debacle, Failure to Launch.
The title of the film Failure to Launch is a very ironic one in that the movie never really gets off the ground. Don’t get me wrong, I like both Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey. I do not think that either one of them is the perfect actor, but they are certainly decent romantic comedy stars.
However, we have already seen this basic plot before in another one of McConaughey’s movies: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. In that movie, Kate Hudson makes a bet with a friend to dump a guy that she is using for her story in 10 days and ends up falling in love with him. In Failure to Launch, Sarah Jessica Parker makes a deal with a guy’s parents to get him out of the house in a certain amount of days and ends up falling in love with him. Not exactly swimming with originality, is it?
Even if the viewer can get past this close similarity, the movie still falls short. The running gag is that McConaughey is constantly being bitten by different random animals: a chipmunk, a dolphin and a vegetarian iguana. Although the writers actually find a way to work this joke into the plot with reasonable fluidity, it is still not funny to begin with, and it’s lame the way that it fits into the story.
The side characters are all superfluous. They do help out the main characters in the end, but are, in themselves, underdeveloped and annoying.
In addition to all of these points, the movie is completely predictable. I know that no one goes to a romantic comedy not expecting the two main characters to end up together, but where each relationship in the movie is going in the end is even more obvious than usual.
The only highlights are the parents, played by Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw. However, Bradshaw shows his butt in one scene, which is disgusting enough to make one not want to watch the movie at all.
Also, the question remains: how would a girl get herself into this situation in the first place?
We do learn that she had a rough relationship that eventually led to this job but how could this be a full-time job and would she really quit her job because of a breakup? What did she do before? None of these questions are answered. In one word, is this the worst movie of the year so far? Yes.
