If there's one Hollywood cliche that needs to be taken behind the barn, shot down like an old horse, and ground into cinematic dog food, it's the heartfelt speech some dope makes to win back his girlfriend.
“Hey, absurdly pretty girl who was right to break up with me,” an idiot will declare, “I know I've screwed up all the way through the last 90 minutes, and I'm sorry about that. Here's a bunch of emotions I only recently discovered. Let's be happy forever.” This doesn't match up too tight with my observation of real-life examples of this kind of meeting, which normally go closer to “Hey, ex! I'm drunk. Why don't you come over and we'll get naked together.”
It's not the disconnect between film and reality that bugs me, it's that the big teary speech has become such an everyday convention that screenwriters feel no guilt in using it, leaving us to watch the same damn climax every damn movie. They could have at least gone with an interesting finale to turn into a cliche. Just imagine. Instead of the played-out emotional reconciliation of comedies like Miss March, all unimaginatively plotted movies could be ending with people resolving their disputes by dressing up in panda suits and holding rocket races around the moon.
In Miss March, high school sweethearts Zach Cregger and Raquel Alessi have been abstinent together for over two years, but as prom approaches, Alessi convinces him it's time to seal the deal. Before he can jump her, Cregger drunkenly falls down a set of stairs, dropping into a coma.
Four years later, friend Trevor Moore pulls him out of it by beating him with a baseball bat. Moore's stayed with him, but Cregger's dad has gone, and so has Alessi. All it takes is the delivery of Moore's precious Playboy to solve that mystery: she's become a Playmate.
With a party upcoming at the Playboy Mansion, the solution suggests itself. Hit the road and crash the party so Cregger can confront his old girlfriend and Moore can meet women who get naked for money.
Prepare yourself for two characters the likes of which have never been seen: Cregger as the responsible prude and Moore as the sex-crazed comic relief. It's a wonder how two such opposites could become friends, but no doubt they'll get each other into worlds of trouble.
Minds blown yet? Cregger and Moore, who co-wrote and co-directed, then kick up the creativity another notch with plentiful scat jokes and a running gag around a rapper's name. Rappers sometimes have silly names, you see, so if you give one a really silly name and then bring it up over and over and over--you know what, forget it. This is all going way over your head. Don't expect to have the sophistication to get all that brainless crudity, either. If I have to explain why a hot chick drinking a dog's urine is funny, that would rob it of its sublime beauty, now wouldn't it?
Oddly, though, despite having all the ingredients for an obnoxious, wrath-worthy garbage heap, Miss March is pretty much harmless. It does hit a handful of laughs. The rest of its gags aren't actively awful, just lacking. It gives the sense it could have been funny if only the execution were a little more inspired, the writing a little sharper. In another dimension not so far from our own, parallel us-guys are laughing their asses off.
Episodic by nature, road movies aren't helped when the humor's irregular, too. It's also crippling to contrive a semi-love story around a plot where the female "lead" is given infinitely less screen time than the Playboy enterprise, as if the whole thing might be a feature-length commercial for the sinking ship of magazine-based softcore pornography.
Then comes the emotional speechifying, layered with just enough irony to pretend it's making fun rather than rolling out the same tired junk. It's not offensively bad, just instantly forgettable.
Grade: C