How To Be Single review: Low on laughs, long on run time, and a desperate need to be liked makes this a very hard film to stomach.
How To Be Single review
There should be a blanket ban on any film parading around with a self-help styled title. They’re annoying, pompous, and worst of all unfunny. How To Be Single joins the bottom of the barrel ranks of How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days and How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. Even How To Train Your Dragon taught me nothing about dragon training, resulting in the deaths of hundreds. But I digress. Luckily a title is not the be all and end all of what makes a film tolerable, but a shoddy script, obnoxious writing, and repetitive performances sure do.
How To Be Single follows four women all without men. As you can imagine this makes them incomplete in some way or another, and although the film parades itself as a celebration of being single, every minute interaction revolves around the women finding men, going on dates, having sex, or talking about men. Even in a film with four fantastic comediennes, they are only as strong as their heterosexual romances.
How To Be Single review
Dakota Johnson plays Alice, a young woman straight out of college who decides she should take a break from long term boyfriend Josh (Nicholas Braun) so she can experience the single life in New York City. She stays with her sister Meg (Leslie Mann) and makes friends at her new workplace with Robin (Rebel Wilson), both of whom are single. Robin is perpetually looking for one night stands, while Meg has pushed all men aside to focus on her career. There’s also the pointless addition of dating app obsessed Lucy (Alison Brie) whose scenes inflate the runtime to make this another unnecessary two hour comedy. Her part is such an afterthought she doesn’t have any interactions with the other three protagonists.
The film would like you to believe that it is an empowering look at the joys of being single, when in actual fact it just wants to match women up with men lest they die alone and unfulfilled. Even Mann’s career obsessed Meg is dragged down this alley. She decides she wants a baby and is willing to raise it alone, but a one night stand turns into more and she eventually meets a man. We were worried there for a moment. There is a single montage in which Alice enjoys her own company or that of a book, but she’s soon thrust between different men.
As a comedy we can excuse these flaws if it manages to be funny, but here the film fails tragically. Rebel Wilson has become the female Ken Leung, offering us the same character over and over again, with ad libbed lines used no matter whether they suit the persona created for the film or not. The smug script also wants to change our very vernacular, with a number of scenes revolving around Robin and Alice simply having Robin state a theory – dicksand, drink number, or LTRP – and then having Alice ask what that means, only for Robin (or should that be Wilson?) explain. These aren’t actual terms or expressions and the film’s insistence on becoming a quotable cult classic is desperate and off putting.
How To Be Single review
The script also takes big jumps through time and has unexplainable character reactions. When Damon Wayans Jr. has an outburst at Alice, stating “You’re not her mom!”, in regards to his daughter, I honestly thought that was the joke. It comes out of nowhere, and a later scene has Alice ask Robin (in another emotional outburst) “Where is this coming from?” She’s right to ask as the scriptwriters fail to build up to said moments.
How To Be Single is an unlikable mess of a film, generating around three genuine laughs. It delights in shooting on location in New York, but obviously couldn’t close off streets so has to rely on shoddy handheld camera work. This isn’t Bourne, and you need a tripod. Low on laughs, long on run time, and a desperate need to be liked makes this a very hard film to stomach despite some good performances and genuine affection through the Leslie Mann section of the film.
How To Be Single review by Luke Ryan Baldock, February 2016.
How To Be Single is released in cinemas on 19th February.
