Stellar cast can’t save low-comedy ‘I Want You Back’

“I Want You Back”

Rated R. On Amazon

Grade: C-

Shot in an unidentified Atlanta, Amazon’s painfully unfunny rom-com “I Want You Back” features a talented cast, Jenny Slate, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Gina Rodriguez and more, struggling with sub-par material and badly losing the battle. In opening scenes, personal trainer Noah (Eastwood) breaks up with feckless receptionist Emma (Slate), and schoolteacher and frustrated actor Anne (Rodriguez) breaks up with complacent retirement home executive Peter (Day), leaving those broken up with teary-eyed and hurting. In Peter’s case, he openly weeps at a child’s birthday party.

Emma and Peter then team up to try to break up the new relationships their former partners get into. In Noah’s case, he has become very serious about a young woman named Ginny (Clark Backo, “The Handmaid’s Tale”), who owns a pie shop. In Anne’s case, she hooks up with a drama teacher named Logan (Manny Jacinto) at the high school where she teaches English and he is directing a production of the musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” which plays an out-sized role in “I Want You Back.”

In fact, one of the biggest scenes in the film is one in which Slate’s Emma, pretending to be an adult volunteer, has to stand in for the girl playing the lead in the play and sing “Suddenly Seymour” with a student actor (Manny Magnus). Slate carries the tune. But it’s just weird. Emma is a screwball comedy-style heroine. At the high school, she awkwardly befriends a precocious and troubled 12-year-old boy named Trevor (Luke David Blumm), who has learned that his gay father is cheating, again.

Meanwhile, at an executive meeting concerning the retirement home, a female higher-up (yes, that is Jami Gertz) suggests lowering costs by cutting back on feeding the old people. I know, hilarious. Peter dreams of opening his own retirement home and treating his residents better. But he likes the money he makes and the job security, and Anne doesn’t think he has it it in him to run his own home. Can you see how every possible conflict is going to work itself out and who is going to be with whom at the end of “I Want You Back?” I can. The only mystery the film presents is why Pete Davidson would appear in an uninspired cameo. Did he lose a bet?

Directed by Jason Orley of “Pete Davidson: Alive from New York” and “Big Time Adolescence” also with Davidson, which I have not seen, “I Want You Back” is both breathtakingly second-rate and at almost two hours long a real slog. The characters created by screenwriters Isaac Aptaker (“How I Met Your Father”) and Elizabeth Berger (“Love, Simon”), may think they are funny. But the joke is on us. There is even a scene in which two non-smokers try to smoke and cough. Remember when that was funny? Never. On the internet Emma spies her rival Ginny in her pie shop and says, “Look at her muffins.” Okay, that might be funny. But the “hellhole nursing home” jokes are not over. “Dangerous Liaisons,” this is not, although there is a shout out to the “Dangerous Liaisons” update “Cruel Intentions,” a 1999 drama that was 97-minutes long. At a nightclub named Halo, Peter and his “wing man” Noah, who look like they’ve seen 40 come and go, meet three young women. The men dance and drink with them, go to their home and continue to drink and even take molly with them (Yes, this is where Davidson shows up) and then they learn the “women” are high school students. Is that funny?

(“I Want You Back” contains profanity, sexually suggestive language, drug use and partial nudity)

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3QREfh7