How to Be Single

Here is a romantic comedy that pulls off the neat little trick of being neither romantic nor comedic.  How to Be Single is one of the most aimless examples of the genre I have seen in quite a while.  It features multiple plots that go nowhere of interest, and multiple characters who are either underwritten or unlikable.  The movie obviously intends to be a lighthearted look at how to survive the single scene in New York City.  But given how little the screenplay cares about these characters and what's happening to them, the audience simply ends up waiting out the clock until the movie is over.

The central character is Alice (Dakota Johnson from Fifty Shades of Grey), a woman in her 20s who's been in a long term relationship with the sweet and reliable Josh (Nicholas Braun), but decides one day that she wants to take a break from their relationship, because she feels like she hasn't really lived life.  Alice heads for New York to experience city life, and quickly pairs herself up with an obnoxious paralegal co-worker named Robin (Rebel Wilson, horribly used and unfunny here), who becomes her best friend and shows her the ins and outs of the bar scene.  Alice quickly decides this kind of lifestyle isn't for her, and tries to hook back up with Josh, but he has already moved on and found another.  Now she's stuck in the singles scene, and has to find her way.  Luckily, she has her older sister to help her out from time to time.  This is Meg (Leslie Mann), a maternity doctor who is adamant about never getting pregnant herself.  Then, through forced contrivance, she's left alone with another woman's baby for five minutes, falls head over heels in love with the tyke, and wants to get pregnant immediately through a sperm donor.  Because this happens all the time.

There are a lot of guys who walk in and out of Alice's life, not really creating any romantic chemistry, though the movie tries desperately to convince us that something is going on.  There's Tom (Anders Holm) the noncommittal bartender, and a building designer named David (Damon Wayans, Jr.) who has a young daughter and is still grieving over the death of his first wife, but doesn't know how to face it or talk about it with his kid.  And of course, there's Josh who despite claiming that he's going to marry his new girlfriend, still seems to have feelings for Alice.  Meg gets her own romantic subplot when she meets a guy named Ken (Jake Lacy), who she likes a lot, but is afraid to tell him she's pregnant.  This leads to a lot of incredibly stupid scenes where the characters' problems could be solved if they just talked to each other, but they constantly avoid the topic at hand in order to drag the plot out.  Finally, we have a completely pointless side plot that goes absolutely nowhere about Lucy (Alison Brie), a woman who apparently has no job (though she does volunteer to read to children in one scene), and hangs out in a bar all day, meeting guys.  Tom the bartender has his eye on her, but she keeps on falling for wrong guys.  This plot and character goes absolutely nowhere, and the movie would be no better or worse without it.

How to Be Single commits many things you should never do in a romantic comedy, such as making all of the main characters have mush for brains.  If you can't make your characters smart, at least make them likable or interesting.  Apparently, this is too much to ask.  Nobody talks the way these people do, either.  At least I hope nobody has ever said "I'm sinking in 'dicksand' " in a casual conversation before.  Each line of dialogue clangs with a heavy thud.  Instead of inspiring laughter, it simply makes the audience think the credited screenwriters got paid too much to write this stuff.  This movie feels phony on every level.  The characters don't seem real, and neither do their relationships .  This is also a movie with no sense of time or place.  Aside from a couple scenes built around holidays like Christmas and St. Patrick's Day, there's no real way to tell how much time has passed as Alice apparently goes from one guy to the next, kicking things off and breaking things off over and over.  The scenes start to feel jumbled and scattered together.

And then there is Rebel Wilson, who may just be the worst female comedic performance I have seen since Sofia Vergara screeched her way to infamy in last year's Hot Pursuit.  I have enjoyed Wilson in other films, and have even found her to be a bright spot in some.  But here, she kills what little momentum the movie generates whenever she flops on screen.  She is supposed to be the comedic live wire of the film, the character that we go home quoting all of her lines as she constantly makes snarky and obscene comments about the action going on around her.  Yes, she plays no part in the actual movie, she simply shows up and says a lot of unfunny improvised dialogue built around sex, booze and drugs.  We have no idea why a seemingly nice girl like Alice would be best friends with her, as they share nothing in common, and don't even have any chemistry on the screen.  Her character is frequently hung over or on drugs, insults everyone around her, and everything that comes out of her mouth is a another word for sex or the female sexual organ.  In this movie, she's intended to be a cut up.  In real life, if she was hanging out with you, you'd be doing your best to get away from her while she constantly cracked up at her own jokes.

The movie obviously aims to be another one of those "girls gone wild" comedies that have been so popular lately.  But, it's not as naughty as it seems to think it is.  Aside from the four letter words and the off-color humor provided by Rebel Wilson, this movie is actually about as stock as you can get for a movie of this type.  It simply doesn't have the guts to truly be crude.  It think having one of the characters talking non-stop about booze and sex is enough.  It's obviously not, and it feels like a pathetic attempt on the part of the writers to put some color into a script that they know isn't really working.  If you want to see this kind of humor done right, you should go see Deadpool. (And judging by the box office numbers last weekend, you probably did.) That movie knows how to be crude without being desperate.

How to Be Single simply doesn't try hard enough.  It doesn't open up these characters enough for us to like them, or it makes them intentionally obnoxious to the point that we don't want to even know them.  If this movie was actually interested in what these people were going through and their feelings, that would be something.  This movie is a whole lot of nothing.

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