This is an absolutely stupid movie that I couldn’t stop laughing with.
What They Say:
Phil has a major dependency issue – he’s addicted to his phone. He has no friends, he has a job writing pop culture ‘Top 10’ lists, and his love life is non-existent. But his Facebook status is about to change. When he is forced to upgrade his phone, the latest model comes with an unexpected feature… Jexi – an A.I. life coach, virtual assistant, and cheerleader. With her help, Phil begins to get a real life. But as he becomes less dependent on his phone, Jexi’s artificial intelligence morphs into a tech nightmare determined to keep Phil all to herself, even if it means ruining his chances of finding success.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The reasons we choose to go to the theater to watch a movie are pretty varied and often unique to the moment based on a range of situational elements. I ended up at the theater tonight to see Jexi, one of my two choices with Gemini Man out, and I opted for a silly romantic comedy movie that clocks in at 84 minutes. That means there’s a good chance you’ve seen the bulk of it through the various trailers that are out, including a red-band trailer, as it takes the basic gag and runs with it. Written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the film is your standard romcom where you can see each and every piece hit like clockwork. I can’t take it down a peg for that because it is pretty a standard thing and the team here did it well. You get a sports montage, you get a dating montage, you get the first tentative kiss, you get the fight. You even get the ex that shows up intent with nefarious plans.
In other words, you’ve seen this movie before.
And with as many films as I’ve watched, lordy have I seen this movie way too many times. But I keep coming back to them like a mixture of comfort food and a refresher to feel emotions – if you let it manipulate you – and to make sure the old ticker is still beating. The other draw for me with Jexi was the cast. I’ll admit it, I actually like Adam DeVine a lot. I liked his turn on Modern Family and wish he had hung around longer. I’ve enjoyed several of his terrible movies of which this is yet another. These are the types of films that have been around forever but are fewer and far between these days. Devine lucks out in having Alexandra Shipp as his opposite here as she brings something a lot more honest and human, a welcome change after mostly just knowing her from the X-Men films (and liking her from Love, Simon).
Michael Pena is a draw as well but he’s poorly used here which leaves Rose Byrne, who I have a stupid affection for as she’s really enjoyed diving into the gutter with characters for a few years since Neighbors. I’m a sucker for that while loving her more serious works. Here, she’s doing just voice work by playing the operating system on DeVine’s character Phil’s phone as Jexi. With Phil accepting the EULA without reading it, she kicks in by taking over his entire digital existence in order to make his life better. Queue up getting him to eat healthy, demand better from his workplace, and trying to get him to make friends. He’s the quiet outsider that’s just too shy for his own good but the film plays cute with all the terrible aspects of this kind of male personality. When he does connect with Alexandra Shipp’s Cate character and gets her phone number, he’s instantly in love and ready to do all the big romantic gestures. Jexi thankfully stops him, but he’s got too many of these awful ideas and no real sense of how to be a decent guy. While it is cute in film form, it again relies on the idea that the woman in the relationship will make him a better man. If he can just grow up enough.
I’m kind of inured to this kind of stuff because it is part and parcel of much of pop culture going back far too long. A lot of us are a lot more aware of it now and expecting better from storytellers and I’m a bit disappointed they went this route because it is the easy and lazy way and simply doesn’t provide a good look for Phil. That said, the real star of the film is Jexi. Rose Byrne gets to just go all out on the insults and invective to try and get Phil on the right path. She calls ‘em like she sees ‘em and that causes plenty of trouble – such as getting him demoted to responding to comments at the listicle site he works for (a basement job, no less!) – and she’s got plenty of insults for everyone. When Phil and Cate get close and she realizes she’s going to lose him, Jexi goes after Cate pretty hard. But within the context of the film, Jexi with Byrne’s voice and the Siri-like inflections, it works very well because it is as ridiculous as it is. And you even have to sympathize with her when Phil, after getting a little bit of a cleavage shot on his phone from Cate, decides to respond with a dick pic, her suffering is quite real and utterly hilarious. Again, it paints Phil in a hugely bad light and plays it for laughs which is problematic, but dammit, I couldn’t help but laugh at just how utterly ridiculous it was and DeVine’s commitment to the scene.
As a side note, this is the final film from CBS Films as the company has been reabsorbed by CBS proper. They’re now focused on making films for CBS All Access and it brings a particular era of film to a close for those like me that remember its weird and complicated history.
In Summary:
I grew up on terrible comedy films in the 80s that have not aged well. I like a lot of what few comedies we get these days as they try to walk the line under the new normal and find creative and more interesting paths to humor. But I also like ones that do what we get here where it does deal with a terrible lead in a lot of ways because sometimes something like this is just going to make you laugh. The technical side of the film is simple and straightforward – including the ridiculously nice places that everyone seems to live in for San Francisco – and it hits all the right marks that you expect out of a standard romantic comedy. It’s not a deep exploration of our lives interconnected with technology, it again goes the low and easy road here, but it does play with it well enough so that you’ll laugh at it, maybe see a bit of yourself in pieces of it and cringe, and generally just does its best in a kind of earnest way to make you laugh. I had a small audience in my showing of just under half a dozen and everyone was laughing pretty damn regularly.
Grade: B-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctacycs-1yc