Isn’t It Romantic
Rebel Wilson is an actress more adept at scene-stealing than standing front-and-center. I didn’t need the romantic comedy send-up “Isn’t It Romantic” to know that- it just confirms what I already knew. In the first “Pitch Perfect,” she was certainly one of the main characters, but she was always on the edges of scenes, making us laugh, and not controlling the narrative. In “Pitch Perfect 2,” she was given more to do with a romantic subplot involving Adam Devine’s character, but that fell a bit flat because of how genuine it tried to be. I don’t know that Wilson is quite able to be genuine as a romantic performer yet; right now, she’s better with making us laugh at absurd beats in the story. (That’s why the craziness of her narrative with her dad in “Pitch Perfect 3” was more effective than what she was given in “2.”) “Isn’t It Romantic” needs more of the absurd, but instead, it wants to be genuine.
As I watched the premise of Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman’s screenplay unfold, I was reminded often of “Date Movie,” the cheap, lazy rom-com parody that started off a string of cheap, lazy parody films after “Scary Movie” that got progressively more awful to watch. This is not on that level, but the fundamental idea is the same- to lampoon rom-com formula. Rebel Wilson is the perfect actress to do this, but unfortunately, the script and director Todd Strauss-Schulson want to have it both ways; they want to make fun of chipper, cheery romantic comedy conventions from the ’80s and ’90s while being a real romantic comedy on its own merits as Wilson’s Natalie, who was told at a young age by her alcoholic mother (Jennifer Saunders) that movies like “Pretty Woman” and “The Wedding Singer” were bullshit, and had no grounding in reality for women like them. She is an architect, but also finds herself marginalized by many of her coworkers. One night, she gets mugged at the subway station, and finds herself knocked on the head. She wakes up in the hospital, but something feels a bit off. If you’ve seen the trailers, you figure out, like Natalie does, that she’s in a romantic comedy world now.
The fact that I can use the old “if you’ve seen the trailers” line in summing up this story tells you everything you need to know about this movie. Unfortunately, it also goes for the biggest laughs in the movie. I will admit that Wilson is a great lead for this premise, and she plays off the supporting cast (like Devine and Liam Hemsworth) pretty well in the rom-com fantasyland, but she’s also asked to play this straight, as well, and that’s where this film trips up. If it didn’t treat the rom-com conventions as a fantasy, and just ran with doing something with this character as a straight send-up, I think they not only could have gotten some real laughs out of it, but also, done something memorable and more fun to showcase Wilson as a performer. As it is, it feels like a generic romantic comedy like the ones it is making fun of.
