Note: I am GOING to spoil this movie. I am GOING to tell you how it ends and exactly all the ways that ending is a failure. Do not say I didn’t warn you, but you should really thank me as now you don’t have to see this piece of shit to know what happens. In a review it will take you two minutes to read I can save you two hours of your life, so, in a way, I’m a life saver. And my mom always wanted a doctor in the family.
What Works: The premise of two CIA spies (played by the always-interesting Tom Hardy from Inception, and the always-uninteresting Chris Pine from Star Trek) fighting over the same woman isn’t the worst one I’ve heard for a romantic comedy. The trailer for this movie shows Reese Witherspoon—-who officially hasn’t made a good movie in years and hasn’t given a good performance since Election, and I’m including Walk the Line in that statement—-being a typical romantic comedy flake by going back and forth between the two guys, not knowing that they’re aware of each other and plotting to one-up the other. Now that movie isn’t such a bad idea…
What Doesn’t Work: Unfortunately, the movie this winds up being is very bad. For one thing (here come the spoilers) you never for a second think she’ll pick Tom Hardy over Chris Pine. Even though Hardy is more interesting—-which everyone who’s seen a Reese Witherspoon programmer like this should know she doesn’t pick interesting—-and mature and he meets her first and he’s more himself while the other guy lies completely and she actually hates Chris Pine when she first meets him because he’s shallow, you know she’ll pick Pine in the end. All romantic comedies seem to favor the shallow guy who turns out to be…a little less shallow, because that gives them an excuse to pick the less interesting or conventionally good looking guy. Interesting is bad, bad, bad in a romantic comedy match.
Just like you never for a second believed they would let the edgier Tom Hardy win the title match in Warrior over Joel Edgerton, you never for a second think she’ll pick the edgy single-dad Hardy over the blandly “smooth” Pine who by now is making a career out of Chris Evans’s hand-me-down roles. Then the movie adds insult to injury by Tom Hardy not seeming to care when she picks Pine over him (even though they almost kill each other fighting for her literally five minutes earlier) and the movie takes the easy-out of reuniting him with his ex-wife/baby mama, once again taking the Hollywood cop out of sticking divorced couples with a kid back together again just so the audience will like it.
And what about Reese? Who cares? The whole time these two guys are fighting over her, she does nothing but act like a twelve year old, pouting, whining, panicking, flaking, never truly getting to know anyone but herself, and consulting her best friend (awkwardly played by the not-ready-for-prime-time Chelsea Handler in the role Judy Greer would have knocked out of the park) about everything. She barely seems like a grown woman, let alone a “great” woman the two should be ruining their friendship over. When she picks the guy who has to completely change himself (i.e. lie) to win her over, and gets married to him in the end, it sends another awful message about dating/love to young women that (unfortunately) do borrow what they see from movies like this.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I still believe a decent spy romantic comedy can be made despite the dozens of failed attempts to the contrary. For starters, how about a movie based on Tom Hardy as a James Bond-type character who’s ready to settle down instead of picking up chicks from Paris to Bali? The cosmic joke about James Bond is that he beds so many beautiful women and has gone on so many missions, he now feels as familiar to us as a suburban dad ready to just stay in every once and a while. Now that movie…might still suck if it were made by the same people who did this, so don’t let them near it!