Movie review time. I hope to become more frequent at doing these once baseball season is over, but in the meantime, they'll be spotty at best.
Failure To Launch is the movie I watched this weekend. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker as well as Terry Bradshaw as Matthew M's dad.
Warning: There will be spoilers. This movie was released in 2006, so I figure anyone who's really burning to see it has already.
Matthew M. plays Tripp, the 35-year-old man who still lives at home with his parents. Whenever he wants to break up with a woman, he takes her home, and when she finds out he lives with Mom and Dad, they leave so fast, there's skid marks.
Mom and Dad, though, want Tripp out of the house so they can have their freedom. They hire Sarah Jessica Parker whose profession is to date these men who will not leave the nest. She has a sequence of events she runs them through and then they grow up enough to leave home and live on their own. Tripp has two male buddies who also still live at home and Sarah Jessica's character, Paula, has the wacky roommate who's out to get the bird singing outside her window.
First of all, I found the premise really difficult to buy into. Not the still living at home part, the part where Paula has a business where she works for parents who want their grown sons to move out. I also didn't buy that she could run each man through the same sequence of events and predict their reactions to each one. People are little too individual for that.
Secondly, if these parents want their sons out of the house, why don't they just ask them to move out? Why hire some woman to manipulate them? That just seems so dysfunctional to me.
The other part that annoyed me was how Tripp was different than the other men she'd dealt with according to Paula. He had a good job, he had social skills, etc. She never sleeps with her clients' sons, but she sleeps with Tripp--in his parents' home while his parents are listening. Why? Because Tripp had brought her home to his parents' house to dump her and she's insulted by that.
I had this in my Netflix queue because I wanted a nice romantic comedy. This wasn't it. Failure To Launch was extremely light weight and the plot holes are enormous. Matthew M didn't even look like his usual gorgeous self, so I didn't even really have any eye candy to help me through this ordeal.
The best part of the movie were Paula and Tripp's friends, especially Paula's roommate and her quest to get rid of the bird that won't let her sleep. Animals actually play a big part in this movie. Most of them attack Tripp, even a dolphin, until the end after he's admitted he loves Paula. Only then does the dolphin love him. Sure.
Did I like the movie? No. Did I watch the whole thing? Yes. Would I recommend it? No. Give this one a pass and find a good romantic comedy.
My rating: 2/5
