He's Just Not That Into You Genre: Comedy, Romance
Duration: 2 hrs. 9 min.
Starring: Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Justin Long, Scarlett Johansson,
Director: Ken Kwapis
Producer: Drew Barrymore, Nancy Juvonen
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures (New Line Cinema)
Release Date: February 6, 2009
Writer: Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein based on the book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Based on the wildly popular bestseller from 'Sex and the City' scribes Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, He's Just Not That Into You tells the stories of a group of interconnected, Baltimore-based twenty- and thirtysomethings as they navigate their various relationships from the shallow end of the dating pool through the deep, murky waters of married life, trying to read the signs of the opposite sex… and hoping to be the exceptions to the 'no-exceptions' rule.
He's Just Not That Into You is another romantic comedy that
struggles with the notion that people are individual, selfish and for
the most part, in this particular movie, deluded. Presented here are
several loosely interconnecting stories, all based around the trouble
and strife that both men and women have with the opposite sex. One
doesn’t understand the other, that much is a given. Do we come
away then from this movie with some spark of insight? Do we get any
kind of satisfaction at its conclusion?
Personally, I would have to say no to both questions. The film is
entertaining enough and while the characters are thin and
predictable, they are still enjoyable to a certain extent.
Stretching the film to two hours is a not a winning idea. The same
could probably be achieved in under ninety minutes. As a huge
Jennifer Aniston and Connelly fan, even I was getting sick of the
neurotic over-amplification after only an hour. The pace of the film
seems laboured and this comes from trying to make yet another film
about the simplest of ideas.
Relationships are never simple. Well, not if you’re one of
these characters. All of them wander and wonder at either the
inadequacies of themselves, their partners or the one that they would
like to be their partner, but couldn’t manage to pull it off
and actually get it together because all of these people are just so
damn complicated. It hurts your head, it really does.
Thankfully, the characters are just about three dimensional enough
to cope with, but that still does not stop them from being needlessly
infuriating. They are the emotional equivalent of a group of dumb
teenagers standing outside a haunted house, deciding whether to go in
or not. Clearly, any sane person is not going to put themselves in
needless and protracted danger, but for the sake of entertainment,
they go ahead and do it anyway. Here, we have people that really
should know better and having personally been through most of the
circumstances placed before us here, none of them deal with their
problems as efficiently as they would be expected to.
The annoyance at them never gets as rabid as fist-waving at the
screen, however, and there are positive elements throughout the
picture. All of the women involved are beautiful to look at and this
may well be on purpose to draw an initially reluctant male audience
that normally wouldn’t be seen dead within a hundred miles of
such a film. There are sporadic moments of comedy, usually tightly
wound in the neurosis of one or more of the characters, that do make
you smile, but at no stage are your sides splitting or rolling in the
aisles.
Overall, a by the numbers rom-com, aimed at twenty something women
with a brain. If you are dragged to this by your partner, then you
probably won’t be satisfied by the end of it and will have
looked at your watch several times before the credits roll. It brings
little to the table and you leave feeling that you have fed, but not
enough to stop the cinematic rumbling in your stomach, still hungry
for something more substantial.