Rom-com skewering uses a blunt stick
Isn’t It Romantic
(out of 4) Starring Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Adam Devine, Priyanka Chopra and Betty Gilpin. Written by Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman. Directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson. Opens Wednesday at theatres everywhere. 88 minutes.
Isn’t It Romantic pretends to be the smartest kid in the class, with its fantasy mocking of the romantic-comedy genre. It comes across instead as the knucklehead at the back of the room making fart noises with his armpit.
The movie constantly reminds us of superior rom-coms — everything from Pretty Wom
an to When Harry Met Sally to 500 Days of Summer — over the course of a sloppily written story that fails as both romance and comedy.
Rebel Wilson is Natalie, an Australian architect working in New York who can’t get no respect. Most of her co-workers bizarrely treat her as a lackey, expecting her to fetch coffee and throw out trash while ignoring her creative ideas for a hotel design (she thinks parking garages should be beautiful). Her alleged assistant, Whitney ( GLOW’s Betty Gilpin), ignores her boss and shirks work by watching romcoms at her desk. That’s the second reason for Natalie to hate rom-coms. The first came 25 years ago, as we see in a flashback, when young Nat was watching Pretty Woman on the telly and her embittered mom (Jennifer Saunders) told her to abandon all hope: “Forget about men, forget about love.”
Natalie has grown up disbelieving happy endings. She doesn’t notice that her nerdy co-worker Josh, played by Wilson’s Pitch Perfect castmate Adam Devine, secretly adores her.
Then Natalie gets knocked unconscious during a subway mugging and — revisiting the hoariest of rom-com clichés — awakens to discover that New York has turned into a Hallmark Cards fantasyland. Flowers are everywhere, the air smells like lavender and strangers spontaneously break into choreographed dances set to bouncy pop tunes. The sullen guy in the next apartment (Brandon Scott Jones) is now the amusing gay friend, as per rom-com regulation.
Men who previously wouldn’t give Natalie a second glance are now besotted with her. These include Blake (Liam Hemsworth), a stuffed-shirt stud who earlier had been complaining about the coffee he stole from her. Now he wants to steal her heart, any way he can.
Natalie isn’t happy about being caught in Cupidland. While she moans — and moans — about it, others take advantage of the situation. Josh catches the eye of Isabella (Priyanka Chopra), a swimsuit model and “yoga ambassador,” and wedding bells start ringing.
No question rom-coms are ripe for skewering, even if you don’t see all that many of them on the big screen these days. But instead of using a sharp instrument, as he did for his slasher-movie cut-up The Final Girls, director Todd Strauss-Schulson employs a butter knife to slather on cheeky tributes to past tropes.
None of the characters in Isn’t It Romantic are interesting, endearing or humorous, the men least of all. Josh is immature and needy; Blake is a jerk even when he’s in love.
Strauss-Schulson sabotages the film’s “love yourself first” message by mocking Natalie for being a plus-sized woman. An early “joke” has her being hit in the street by a runaway food cart, but she miraculously emerges unscathed thanks to her corpulence. The movie also comes up short with its choreographed musical numbers, another rom-com staple. They’re poorly designed and executed, suggesting there wasn’t a whole lot of time and money available for staging and rehearsal.
Instead of just making a nosethumbing reference to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s swooning dance from 500 Days of Summer, Strauss-Schulson should have studied it more closely. Set to “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates, it’s a two-minute master class in how to simultaneously send up and celebrate rom-com conventions.