Failure to Launch

If you’ve read any of my other romantic comedy reviews, then you know that I don’t care much for them, particularly when they fall into the same pattern:

-boy and girl meet
-one is deceiving the other (or on occasion both are doing the deceiving) for some stupid reason, and you want to scream at them, “Hey, have you not ever seen a romantic comedy before?! Don’t you know everything will be much easier if you’re just honest right now, from the beginning?!”
-they fall in love but believing in the deceptions
-the big reveal happens and one or both find out the other was not being honest
-there’s a big fight and it seems like there’s no way the two can possibly reconcile
-the two reconcile anyway, almost always way too quickly to be realistic

I can’t say that Failure to Launch deviates much from this pattern, but it does have some things going for it that do make it at least slightly more appealing to me than most other RC’s I watch.

The plot goes something like this: Tripp (Matthew McConaughey) is thirty five and still living with his parents. His love life is fairly screwed up. Either girls find out he still lives at home and take off on him, or he freaks out when they start to look to him for a serious relationship and purposely uses his home situation to get out of the relationship. So his parents (the hysterical Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw) hire a woman named Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to date Tripp and manipulate him into moving out. Naturally, Paula really falls in love with Tripp instead of just pretending to, Tripp finds out about her being hired by his parents and gets pissed and breaks up with her, and then the family and friends all team up to try to get them back together again.

None of that is particularly new to the genre, now is it? But the main thing this movie has going for it is the cast, particularly the supporting cast. My favorite is probably Zooey Dashanel (previously in Elf and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) as Paula’s roommate and polar opposite. She’s sort of what a goth chick would be like after she grew up a little bit and changed the wardrobe some, too. In this movie, she reminds me a lot of Janneane Garofalo, but less abrasive. A lot of the best laughs in the film come from her and her antics. Two other great parts of the cast are Bartha and Bradley Cooper as Tripp’s friends Ace and Demo. The way the three guys play off each other also provides much of the film’s laughs.

There are also quite a few animal attack gags in the film which are pretty stupid but made me and my movie-watching-mates laugh quite a bit, and they manage to explain the unusual number of them an a semi-reasonable way by the end of the film.

If you are a romantic comedy person, you’ll most likely enjoy this one. If you’re not, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway, especially if Kit’s sense of humor is the type that really makes you laugh, but you may not wish to go out of your way to go catch it.