WFTB Score: 8/20
The plot: With his wedding to Zooey fast approaching, Peter Klaven confronts the reality that he doesn’t have a close male friend to act as his best man. Acquiring one proves to be fraught with difficulties, until a chance meeting with ‘investor’ Sydney Fife leads to an exciting new world of male bonding. But will the relationship with Zooey survive Peter and Sydney’s powerful bromance?
Los Angeles estate agent Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) has plans: if he can convince someone to buy Lou Ferrigno’s house at the right price, he can start buying land towards a development of his own; while on a personal level, Zooey (the charming Rashida Jones) accepts his proposal of marriage, the news leapt upon with glee by her close circle of friends including dippy Hailey (Sarah Burns) and Denise (Jaime Pressley). Peter, however, has no-one to spread the news with but his family, and when he overhears the women fretting that he’ll become a clingy husband without male friends, he decides he must get at least one.
A poker night with Denise’s aggressive husband Barry (Jon Favreau) ends in disaster, as does a ‘man-date’ with Doug (Thomas Lennon), and it looks like Peter’s gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) will have to do the best man duties. Luckily, Sydney (Jason Segel) turns up at an open house at the Ferrigno place, and Peter is intrigued by the big man’s laid-back, self-pleasing style, not to mention his love of Canadian prog-rock band Rush (no, me neither**); but as the men bond, Sydney’s plain-speaking ways and demands on Peter’s time and wallet start to put a strain on the lovers’ relationship, to the extent that the wedding itself is put in jeopardy.
At a first glance, it’s frankly amazing that I Love You, Man – with its familiar cast, incessantly fruity language and obsession with things sexual – has no connection whatsoever with Judd Apatow. Look again, however, and it’s not so surprising: firstly, there’s no Seth Rogen, Segel taking the slacker role that would surely have been his; secondly, the film often sails so close to The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s winds that Apatow might think he’d already made the film once. I Love You, Man is essentially a variation on the themes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, with Rudd taking Steve Carell’s place as the man who never got round to making that ‘special’ friend, displaying a similar verbal awkwardness, the same embarrassment around the poker table and so on. The movie also has strong echoes of Mike Gayle’s book Brand New Friend, although I would imagine purely by coincidence.
These comparisons don’t really get the film reviewed, of course; and the only question that really matters is whether the film works on its own terms. Unfortunately, the answer is a non-committal ‘not really.’ The relationships at the heart of the film are believable and entertaining, Rudd and Jones making a nice couple and Rudd and Segel riffing off each other (musically as well as comically) to good effect. There are also decent contributions made by Lennon, Burns (who has fun during a disastrous double date), J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtin (as Peter’s parents), while Jon Favreau consistently steals scenes with appealingly overbearing boorishness.
On the other hand, the writing rarely rises above the sniggering level of the classroom, the focus of the jokes coming from such lofty topics as farts, vomit, masturbation and oral sex; and while there’s a nice, Egypt-offending joke about Sydney’s dog looking like Anwar Sadat, it’s ruined by the fact that Syd, who we’re presumably meant to like on some level, refuses to clear up the animal’s poo – his other attributes include freeloading and preying on vulnerable divorcees. You could argue that this adds to our own apprehensions towards him, fears compounded when he asks Peter for money, but Sydney’s disruption of Peter’s life never feels as though it could ultimately result in catastrophe. The plot merely hobbles along in a thoroughly predictable fashion towards an equally unsurprising climax, and a contrived, largely undeserved mega-happy ending for all concerned.
I Love You, Man avoids some potential pitfalls quite neatly. For while suggesting that there’s no higher love than that between two men, it – unlike Superbad – also finds time to enjoy relationships between females, as well as heterosexual and homosexual love. Rudd’s affability also helps to offset Segel’s chauvinism, though he’s by no means as obnoxious here as in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Rashida Jones is sweet in a part that might have been naggy. But it’s rarely more than lightly amusing and is destined to be swiftly forgotten, by me at any rate.
NOTES: 1I’m glad to review this film because I received a request, back in the day, to do so – though it did take two years to get around to it. The moral? I do requests, but you might have to be patient.
2This is a reflection of my ignorance rather than an observation about the qualities of Rush, who may well be superb. They are almost certainly bigger in North America than they have ever been in Britain.
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