Failure to Launch

If Failure to Launch had been set on another planet than ours, maybe I'd be able to believe its characters and its situations. Unfortunately, the film is set right here on good old Earth, and as such, I found it hard to believe what I was seeing. Here is a romantic comedy so ineptly put together, the film couldn't have worked at any stage of development, not even in the conceptual stage. It is an annoying, overly quirky date movie that tries to combine heartfelt sentiment, wacky sub plots, and slapstick humor. The fact that it fails at everything it tries to be is no surprise when you consider that the director, Tom Dey, previously directed Showtime, one of the worst of Eddie Murphy's recent comedic misfires. From the editing to the scripting, this is total amateur night filmmaking, and how it attracted such a big name cast remains a mystery.

The male lead is Tripp (Matthew McConaughhey), a 35-year old slacker who still lives at home with his parents, and spends most of his time bumming around with his two best friends, Ace (Justin Bartha) and Demo (Bradley Cooper). Despite the fact that they all have bizarre names, the one thing they share in common is that they all still live at home, and have no plans to move on with their lives, as they're having too much fun goofing off. Tripp's parents, Sue and Al (played by Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw respectively) have had enough of their son mooching off of them, and see their golden opportunity when they hear of a woman who somehow has made a career out of forcing grown men to move out on their own. This woman is Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker), and she does this by pretending to fall in love with the son, slowly building up their confidence to move out on their own, then dumping them once they do. How Paula came to choose pretending to date men as a life career, and how she goes about advertising her bizarre service, the movie fails to really explain. And wouldn't the "dumping" part of her plan emotionally scar the man, and perhaps send him spiraling back to the way he was before?

Regardless, the plot creeks onward. Paula is hired by Tripp's parents and, in a plot point that should be of no surprise to anyone who's ever seen a movie before, she actually starts to develop feelings for the guy the more time she spends with him. Though what a dim-witted loser like him and a manipulative and scheming woman like her could remotely see in each other, I have no idea. In order to pad out the film's paper thin storyline, we also get Paula's "wacky" best friend (Zooey Deschanel) and her on-going battle with a mockingbird that has apparently made a permanent home outside her window, and drives her crazy with its constant chirping. We also get numerous scenes of the main characters being attacked by animals, everything from dolphins to chipmunks, all in the name of slapstick that comes out of nowhere and looks like it belongs in a completely different movie. Oh, and in case there are some deranged individuals in the audience that have always hoped to see former NFL quarterback Terry Bradshaw naked, we get that too.

Failure to Launch is the kind of movie that takes a bad idea, and then finds new ways to make it even worse than you imagined. Not a single second of this movie is genuine, believable, or even remotely plausible. While its true that this is supposed to be escapism entertainment, even escapism needs some sort of grounding in reality in order for us to associate with it. With the way the characters are portrayed, the dialogue is written, and the situations are executed, we may as well be looking at the first filmed document of life on Mars. The movie is constantly shifting its tone, seemingly at the drop of a hat. For example, the two main characters may be sharing a quiet moment, when suddenly they are attacked by a normally harmless animal for no reason whatsoever. The movie does try to make a half-assed attempt to explain this bizarre phenomenon, but I think the best explanation is lazy screen writing and a desperate attempt to get a laugh. The movie only gets worse from then on. By the time it reaches an uncomfortably bizarre scene that revolves around one of the main characters being tied to a chair, I had given up hope long ago. More so than the total laziness of the situations is the dialogue itself. Not only are the jokes not funny, but some don't even make any sense, such as the scene where Paula's friend wants to shoot the mockingbird, but she's told she can't, because of the book To Kill a Mockingbird. If you read that last sentence and laughed, then you're the audience Failure to Launch is looking for.

Perhaps more aggravating than the script itself is how sloppily the film has been put together. I honestly think that this is the worst edited mainstream Hollywood comedy I have seen since the Ben Stiller / Jack Black flop, Envy. Characters talk when their mouths aren't moving, a character can be far away but they sound like they're right next to the other person...Most annoying of all is how it often refuses to have more than one character in a single shot, so it's constantly cutting back and forth from person to person over and over again, which gets very irritating during longer scenes. Did director Tony Dey take a look at the finished product and think to himself that it was releasable as it was? This looks like a rough cut that accidentally got shipped off to the cinema before it was ready. The final edited product also doesn't know how to juggle the film's multiple characters or storylines in a successful way. Too much time is spent on needless fluff, while the main plotline of the growing relationship between Tripp and Paula seems to be put on the back burner far too often.

Just like a sinking ship, Failure to Launch manages to bring most of its talented cast down with it. Matthew McConaughey does his usual "aw shucks" good ol' Southern boy act that he always does, most recently last Fall's drama, Two For the Money. He seems to confuse flashing that toothy grin of his for acting most of the time. Sure, some women may swoon, but he's very superficial in his performance and just doesn't have the weight to carry this film. Sarah Jessica Parker comes off as a bit more professional in her performance, but her character is impossible to like, since Paula is more or less a prostitute who sells herself for fake love, and is even willing to go so far as to have sex with men in order to keep the deception running. Zooey Deschanel at least has some personality as the somewhat bitter and sarcastic best friend role, but even she grew tiresome after a while, as her plight to rid herself of the mockingbird menace just failed to generate any laughs. The only actor who generated any real feeling with me is Kathy Bates as Tripp's understanding mother. Then again, I've liked her in just about everything, and not even a movie this bad can kill her charms.

I walked into this movie expecting a lighthearted and frothy concoction that I could at least be amused by. What I got was a stupefyingly brainless and inept film that seems to have been edited with a chainsaw. If that was the least of its problems, Failure to Launch could have still been at least entertaining. A movie like this probably shouldn't have the word "failure" in its title, as it makes it way too easy for critics to make bad title tie-in jokes in their reviews. I have mercifully spared you of this fate. Hopefully this review will also spare you the fate of seeing this movie as well.

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