Review of How to Be Single (2016) by Dennis J — 16 Feb 2016

How To Be Single is really how to give up the good life you built for yourself to become a bar hopping, drunken tramp because that's what Hollywood wants you to do. The movie strives to show women can have sex, enjoy, life and be single and independent while making all of its main characters not only chase after, but desperately need a male counterpart in order to keep them from being lonely, do simple household chores, and anything else that a fully functioning adult should be able to do solo.

On the other hand, all the male characters are either sex addicted, dim witted, or commitment-phobes.

The movie itself feels like a script that was written in a week, with no rewrites to connect one scene to the next. Rather than fixing it, the director decided to just shoot the scenes and leave it to the editor to put the pieces together. The editor, however, never got the memo and just constructed this hypocritical, empty shell of a movie to which the producers just said screw it, we have Dakota Johnson, release it on Valentine's Day and do press about feminism.

There are far too many characters bouncing around with very little effort to balance each story, the jokes are uncomfortably unfunny, the plot discredits the movies theme, and while it attempts to sing a different tune in the very end, and I do mean the VERY end, it overall comes across as a sloppy attempt to show that women don't need men, they just need each other - and men, and booze, and their exes, and pancakes, and someone to help them take off their clothes.