Mack & Rita

Mack & Rita is a scattershot and airheaded comedy that wastes the talents of the invaluable Diane Keaton in a role that forces her to overact to extremes.  She's up there on the screen, expelling massive amounts of energy, but to what end?  Yeah, I admire her for plugging away at her age, but I also felt sad if this is the best kind of material she can get.

The film kicks off with 30-year-old Mack Martin (Elizabeth Lail), a writer who grew up idolizing the grandmother who raised her, and so she's always felt like an old woman in a young person's body.  While her  friends are obsessed with the latest trends and music, Mack has always secretly envied the older women who seem so knowing and wise.  While on a bachelorette trip for the upcoming wedding of her best friend (Taylour Paige), Mack sneaks away to a tent run by a guru (Simon Rex) who claims he has a pod that can reveal who you truly are inside.  Mack lies down in the pod, and when she comes out, she's aged 40 years, and is now played by Keaton.  Mysteriously, the guru has vanished, a plot point that should be important, yet the movie completely forgets to address until he shows up again at the end, again without any explanation.

Mack panics, allowing Keaton to do a lot of forced slapstick that she's way too good of an actress to be doing, even at her age.  Seeing her screaming, flailing her arms, and doing "funny" falls into swimming pools made me sink low in my seat.  Soon, however, she creates a ruse that she is Mack's Aunt Rita, and that she is doing a house swap.  At least, that's what she tells her sexy neighbor, Jack (Dustin Milligan), whom Mack initially hired to watch over her dog, Cheese. (Yes, Mack has a dog named Cheese, which tells you this movie's level of humor.) Jack starts flirting with "Aunt Rita" (something Mack was always too shy to do), and "Rita" even becomes a hit on social media as an influencer.

All of this is done at a sluggish pace, which makes Mack & Rita's relatively brief 95 minute run time feel like two and a half hours.  Toss in an unfunny script, and absolutely no insights into its topics of love and aging whatsoever, and you have probably the most witless and unnecessary movie I've sat through this year.  If you want to know how desperate this movie is for laughs, the film actually has a scene where "Rita" becomes convinced that if she drinks tea made of psychedelic mushrooms, she will regress back to her proper age.  Again, no explanation as to why she would think this would work.  It's all a set up for a bizarre sequence where she starts hallucinating that her dog is talking to her, with the dog being voiced by Martin Short.   

Again, I feel the need to ask, is this really the best script that a genuine talent like Diane Keaton can find at her age?  Yes, I know she's 76, and I'm sure she's grateful for what she can get.  But, she must have been able to tell that this script is manure?  Was there no one there to stop her and say, "You've worked too long and too hard to settle for an extended slapstick scene where you try to use a Pilates machine"?  And while the romantic subplot involving Jack and Rita is supposed to be sweet and heartwarming, it simply rings false, and ends up just being weird.  After all, he thinks he's hitting on his neighbor's aunt, and she wants him to think she's her aunt.  Do writers actually get paid for dreaming up plots like this?

With its wish-fulfillment age fantasy angle, Mack & Rita obviously aims to be thought along the lines of 1988's Big or 2004's 13 Going on 30.  Instead, it's likely to leave audiences just bored, confused, and wanting to forget they ever bothered to watch it.  That's exactly what I plan to do as soon as I finish writing this sentence. 

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