Review of Something Borrowed (2011) by Sylvester K — 19 Feb 2013

"Something Borrowed" feels like a drama that showed off the impact of friendships betrayed and relationships falling apart that audiences responded negatively to and was re-written as a bad romantic comedy. There are many, many problems with the film and the most glaring is the casting. Colin Egglesfield is so handsome that you don't believe for a second that he wouldn't be man enough to ask the girl he's really after out (the movie even goes out of its way to show how attractive he is by having women at the bar scowling at the girl he's with and basically begging him to come over and talk to them). Ginniger Goodwin is also badly cast because she is too attractive. Had she been a mousy or slightly overweight girl that had a great personality you could believe that "Dex" would go for the super-hot friend "Darcy" but the way the movie plays out with this cast it feels like "Beautiful people with lots of money and drama, the movie".

The plot of the film is deeply flawed and often the characters act illogically ("Darcy" and "Dex" are both lawyers after all, so that means they should have some smarts). Kate Hudson's character "Darcy" has zero chemistry with everyone else because the movie goes out of its way to make her completely unlikeable, almost to a cartoonish level. As the movie goes along you realize that there is no reason for "Dex" to be engaged to her because there is never a moment where it feels like they're in love. Once "Darcy" and "Dex" start having an affair (because they go out of their way to keep sleeping with each other) the movie starts showing you flashbacks of why they're both "the one that got away" but that won't counter the fact that these two people are betraying themselves and all of their friends.

The end of the money feels completely phoney, with revelations that feel like last minute re-writes to justify the actions of the main characters. There are 3 characters that reveal some secrets that will make you wonder how any of these people are friends and how they could go through the whole movie acting the way they did when they were doing the opposite the whole time. There is also a post-credit scene that is supposed to make you laugh but it makes no sense and it will make you hate this nearly 2-hour long trainwreck of a "romantic comedy". The film is well shot and the acting is fine but other than that, very little in the movie works. "Something Borrowed" is a romantic drama/comedy that has a lot of lame drama, few laughs and isn't very romantic at all. (Blu-ray, February 15, 2013).