PLOT: Girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy again. With a few laughs.
Adult children still living at home with their parents is a contemporary reality, and chat fodder for Oprah or Dr. Phil.
(Or maybe Jerry, if home is a trailer. With incest.)
The social phenom of kids who just won't leave is the comedic basis of Failure To Launch, a romantic comedy about a guy who won't leave home and the girl who is supposed to help him do so.
Matthew McConaughey is Tripp, a 35-year-old bachelor who still resides with mom and dad. He's cute, he's successful, he's educated, but he just won't leave the nest.
There's an emotional reason why he doesn't want to go, but that comes later.
Mom and dad meanwhile, are desperate for some alone time. How can they get their son to move out and grow up?
They hire a professional consultant. She is Paula, (Sarah Jessica Parker) a smart, perky woman who will, essentially, get their son to fall in love with her and thus move him emotionally to a more adult state so he will be able to live independently.
That's wordy, but it sounds better than saying she's just like a prostitute, only sex isn't really part of the package.
Creepy?
You betcha, but romantic comedy is often played out on the field of ickyness and manipulation. And lies.
Anyway, as you'd predict, Tripp and Paula fall in love. It's not very interesting. Then he finds out she's a hired hand, he freaks, they split, they get back together, and blah, blah, blah.
Still, Failure To Launch is considerably better than most romantic comedies, and that's because somebody had the good sense to cast Zooey Deschanel as Paula's roommate.
Her character is a booze-loving nihilist with strange problems -- like a mockingbird making noise at her window, for example.
Deschanel is part of an embroidered edge of weirdness to the movie that's the source of most of the laughs. Scenes set in a gun shop or a paintball park, for example, have an off-kilter edge that offers big amusement value; Deschanel is generally part of any such scene.
Failure To Launch has a cast that includes NFL Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw and Kathy Bates as Tripp's parents, and Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha as Tripp's buddies and fellow live-at-home types. They all have their moments. And they all help ameliorate the lack of chemistry between the leads.
BOTTOM LINE: It's a romantic comedy, people. You know the turf.
(This film is rated PG)
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