Review of They Came Together (2014) by Michael M — 21 Sep 2014

It's very obvious what this film is trying to do. As a romantic comedy satire, it's like a highbrow Leslie Nielsen movie. The cast is great and overall it's for a more pretentious audience. Nielsen's films were just simply for laughs, but this one wants to have a deeper message--and I think gets its point across well.

But in comedies we like to find some comfort knowing that they style of humor won't be all over the board. We want consistency and reliability. Some jokes were amazingly funny and some were simply there to gross us out. And those of the latter variety created a jarring inconsistency in the tone and made the humor unpredictable. They didn't fit, and there weren't enough of them in there to make the film a true gross-out comedy either. Therefore the erraticism of those jokes make us feel even more uncomfortable than the actual jokes themselves. And any of them could have been easily fixed by not making them go on for as long. And if this film's purpose was to have a deeper message, these jokes pop up every once in awhile and make the film less highbrow than what it's aiming for and actually turns into a Scary Movie type of film.

However, throughout all the irreverence and ridiculousness, you're strangely still invested in these characters. And in the end the message is sincere in that not all of these rom-coms feature seemingly perfect endings, while we never see what happens afterwards. Will they stay together or drift apart? We get too blinded by our emotions to think about it usually. Romeo and Juliet seem perfectly in love, but if they hadn't died maybe they would have ended up realizing that they weren't soul mates after all.

I like this film for everything except for the few inconsistent jokes. I'll try to see past that.

Twizard Rating: 80.