Review of The Extra Man (2010) by Allison M — 04 Apr 2011

As much as I wanted to like this film, its humor spends too much time reveling in its quirkiness and not enough time prodding the audience to laugh. Not that they would.

There's a fine compliment of actors here, but in the world since 'Little Miss Sunshine', it's all too easy to pad a basic concept with offbeat characters and expect it to gel. Here, the characters are offbeat for the sake of their offbeatness and the only two characters who are given depth lack it in one way or another, filling the audience with a sense of ennui as they gallivant around escorting elderly dates. The narration, as is often the case with movies, bogs down the proceedings by telling us what we already know or could have figured out, removing the subtlety that could have allowed us to make our own discoveries. The humor is a hodgepodge of conceits that fails to set a rhythm for the film's core, thus making most of the sequences vacuous.

With so much talent involved, it can be hard to determine what exactly went wrong. Not here. It's easy to watch this film and think that few people involved with it knew what they were doing, leaving the audience to wonder exactly the same thing when watching it.