'I Want You Back' overlooks the ABCs of romantic comedies
Amazon
All the laughs and casual watchability in the world mean little in a romantic comedy if you don’t really root for the main characters to be together. You need to be at least in partial swoon by the end, and “I Want You Back” is more likely to furrow the brow than flutter the heart.
The premise is so simple that it evokes everything from Hitchcock (“Strangers on a Train”) to Seinfeld (when Jerry and Elaine want Beth and David): Emma (Jenny Slate) and Peter (Charlie Day) both have been recently dumped. As they happen to work in the same office building and meet mid-emotional breakdown in the stairwell, it’s the perfect timing for these two very sad and quite nice people to become friends and co-schemers to get back their exes. That means Emma trying to break up Peter’s ex Anne (Gina Rodriguez) and her new boyfriend Logan (Manny Jacinto), and Peter befriending Emma’s ex Noah (Scott Eastwood) and directing him away from his new girlfriend Ginny (Clark Backo). It’s a clean concept that lends itself to steady progress and a dulling, episodic feel, bouncing between Peter bonding with Noah (including a very stale sequence involving drugs, girls who are not who they thought they were, and Pete Davidson) and Emma awkwardly volunteering to help with the middle school play directed by Logan and costume designed by Anne — who justifiably thinks this random woman in her early 30s (who doesn’t have a kid at the school) probably has an ulterior motive.
It’s too long and too contrived (which is saying a lot for the genre), so that the movie works at all is a credit to writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (“Love, Simon”) and the affability of the stars, who are so easy to root for in general even if not specifically. But too much of “I Want You Back” feels stuck in a middle ground between raunchy and sweet, complex and straightforward. The romantic comedy never promised a high-level understanding of relationships, but “I Want You Back” attempts to tap into interpersonal details that it doesn’t quite stabilize through the dynamics of the couples. And as appealing as Slate (phenomenal in the far superior “Obvious Child”) and Day (one of the MVPs of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) may be, Emma and Peter hardly crackle, even in the low-key, long-term-potential sense. It’s hard to make easygoing compatibility pop on screen, but that’s no excuse for the forced ending of “I Want You Back,” which kills the mood and any realism the story had going for it.
If there’s anything a story about enduring relationships should know, it’s that a disappointing ending has a way of negating a promising start.
C
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