Review of You Again (2010) by Steven P — 24 Sep 2011

I am genuinely baffled by what so many talented actors were doing in such a terrible, terrible movie. (It was bad enough seeing Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Victor Garber and Sigourney Weaver suffering; I almost cried when Kristin Chenoweth turned up.) This movie goes off the path right away when it forgets the rather crucial "rom" part of a romcom; when a film features a woman trying to stop another woman marrying a specific man, you tend to expect the first woman to end up with the man at the end of the movie. The problem here is that the man in question in this film is her brother, so the whole film takes on a weird, incesty vibe. It doesn't help that the script almost entirely forgets to give Bell's character a love interest until the actual end of the movie - he's in about three scenes tops, their interaction is minimal at best, and she has far more chemistry with the actor playing her brother than she does with the actor playing her would-be lover anyway.

Even beyond that, this film is a mess - for the plot to make any sense whatsoever, every single person in the movie needed to have sustained a serious head trauma since leaving high school, the direction is sluggish, the bully's eventual apology is a giant plot hole (she claims that she didn't want her new family to know the person who she used to be - then why didn't she just apologise to Marnie in private later?) and it's all just such a waste of an interesting idea and a talented cast.