I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone I'm probably the greatest man alive.
On a completely unrelated note, we all agree confidence is sexy. The analytical part of your brain might tell you that breezy guy or girl is so foolish they're single-handedly putting the Fool's Guild out of business, but the easily intimidated attraction center is saying "Yeah, but he acts like he knows what he's doing, right? No president or Napoleon has ever been wrong about his own abilities before."
Next thing you know, you're mounting a doomed expedition into the heart of Russia during the height of winter, you dummy. Try explaining that one to the divorce lawyers. But you never hear about the downsides of confidence these days. It's all "believe in yourself and you can be or do anyone," as in the barely adequate She's Out of My League.
When Jay Baruchel returns the beautiful and successful Alice Eve's lost cell phone, he doesn't do it because he wants to jump all over her she's obviously too good for him but because it's a nice thing to do. She's so far off his radar he doesn't understand their first date is a date until it's over.
No one, including Baruchel, knows what she sees in him. With his meager confidence undermined by friends and family, his insecurities soon threaten to destroy their fledgling relationship.
Though She's Out of My League isn't a Judd Apatow production, the presence of Baruchel, one of Apatow's regulars, brings certain expectations. First, it shall be no shorter than 500 hours long. Second, instead of sandwiches, craft services shall provide the actors with a) a buffet table of weed and more weed and b) a couch so large that, much like a ship in a bottle, it must be constructed within the building itself. Lastly, the movie shall be funny as hell.
League doesn't match any of that except the funny part. Even then it's less "as hell" and more "except when it's not." Still, comedy's difficult, and this one is decent enough to just about redeem an otherwise questionable movie.
Because everything else about it is a real mixed bag. T.J. Miller, stuck with the role of "annoying loudmouth who's got the whole world figured out and is quite intent on telling you all about it," provokes a few laughs despite spending the entire movie ranting about how 5s cannot last with "hard 10s" (at best, they might snag a 7).
While there's some truth to his theory of relationships, it's so old that schlubby T-Rexes were telling their skinny friends to forget about the girl with the svelte little forearms and settle for the chubby-tailed one instead.
Amazingly, Miller's walking cliche is as developed as League's side characters get. Everyone else is so undercooked that if you ate them you would not only die of food poisoning, your corpse would be able to ooze right out of the coffin after finishing its transition to an enormous amoeba. One guy's defining characteristic? He repeatedly calls Baruchel "pirate." I don't even know what this means, other than writers Sean Anders and John Morris should have spent a lot more time with their script.
The leads: equally charming and dull. The direction: sullied by rom-com foolishness (including big heartfelt speeches and an airport chase. Airplanes have ruined more relationships than money issues and Hooters waitresses combined). Still, I thought it was kinda funny, and for me, that buys a lot of forgiveness.
Grade: C
