When I had you to myself
It’s hard to tell whether the original Amazon romcom I Want You Back is serviced by or suffers from the fact that it came out exactly one week after their taps-running snoozefest Book of Love. On the one hand, anything would be preferable to watch than Book of Love. On the other hand, holy shit, another one? This is unfortunate for I Want You Back, which needs all the help it can get to stand on its own two feet.
The film, which is basically the romcom equivalent to Strangers on a Train, follows Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate) through a pair of particularly harrowing breakups. Emma's personal trainer boyfriend Noah (Scott Eastwood) has dumped her because she doesn't have her shit together and is already in a new relationship with beautiful piemaker Ginny (Clark Backo). Peter's English teacher girlfriend Anne (Gina Rodriguez) feels like his complacency is making her complacent, so she dumps him in favor of Logan (Manny Jacinto), the sexy and worldly drama teacher at her school.
When Peter and Emma meet by chance because their offices share an emergency stairwell, they decide to work together to break up these new couples. Peter will befriend Noah and be a flea in his ear, and Emma will volunteer at Logan's middle school production of Little Shop of Horrors and attempt to seduce him away from the jealous Anne. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before, because otherwise I'll have to cut this review short: Over the course of ostensibly hilarious shenanigans, they slowly begin to fall for one another, which is complicated by the machinations of their evil plan.
My immediate question is thus: why the fuck is this movie two hours long? While it might be the manifest destiny of superhero films to claim as many hours of our lifeforce as possible, the ever-expanding shores of their run times seem to exert a gravitational pull that drags out the length of everything else along with them. With a cleaner screenplay, I Want You Back could have been a tight 90 minutes and solved most of its problems in the process. For instance, any reasonable screenwriter would have had Peter and Emma decide on their plan in the scene where they meet in the stairwell, rather than spending 10 to 15 minutes just kind of wandering around with them shooting the shit first. Especially when those scenes of shooting the shit have nothing to offer beyond the most obvious choices (you better believe they sing Alanis Morisette's "You Oughta Know" at karaoke?).
Alas, I Want You Back's screenplay is probably its biggest liability. Every comic setpiece here is one that would have been rejected by American Pie 2 in 2001 for being too cliché, and would have been done better if that film had decided to include it in the first place. I Want You Back exists in this strange liminal space between sex comedy and chaste romcom that does not suit it one bit.
Another thing I Want You Back steals from superhero films is cinematography that actively rebels against displaying images in a satisfying way. The underlit digital cinematography isn't actively ugly, but it presents us with an insipid sheen that aspires and fails to reach the level of vulgar blandness that typifies most Netflix originals.
Like any of these generic streaming romcoms, I Want You Back lives and dies on the strength of its cast, and it has assembled an unusually strong one. Almost every single cast member is serviced in one way or another by the audience's awareness of their past career, especially Charlie Day and Jenny Slate. They're strictly on coasting mode here, but the comic goodwill they have built up over their collected decades in the business results in an excess of charisma and charm despite the characters really not having any romantic chemistry to speak of.
Jenny Slate is the MVP here, clearly ad-libbing over the script and saving as many scenes as the dialogue attempts to ruin. Her one slip-up is a moment of connection with Logan when she is forced to replace the tween actress last minute and sing "Suddenly, Seymour" during a tech rehearsal, impressing him with her performance. It's absolutely not her fault that Ellen Greene exists and that her performance as Audrey has been captured on camera and distributed to the masses, but she does and it was, so it's hard to be particularly impressed by Slate's rendition, alienating us from the entire crux of that scene.
The rest of the cast acquits themselves rather well, too. Manny Jacinto manages to spin his inimitable The Good Place performance and nail a character who is also an oblivious dope, but in such a different way that it showcases his excellent range. And I don't know if Scott Eastwood has harnessed untapped wells of comedy potential or if his wooden acting style has been well-harnessed by the director to service his meathead character, but he is atypically charming as hell. Gina Rodriguez and Clark Backo have more thankless roles here, but they are both entirely pleasant to watch just the same.
I Want You Back ultimately just barely ekes its way across the line into being worth watching, assuming you're completely tapped out on better romcoms. Certainly, if you're a viewer with a hide thickened by, say, a couple dozen Hallmark original movies, this will be a welcome confection.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The film, which is basically the romcom equivalent to Strangers on a Train, follows Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate) through a pair of particularly harrowing breakups. Emma's personal trainer boyfriend Noah (Scott Eastwood) has dumped her because she doesn't have her shit together and is already in a new relationship with beautiful piemaker Ginny (Clark Backo). Peter's English teacher girlfriend Anne (Gina Rodriguez) feels like his complacency is making her complacent, so she dumps him in favor of Logan (Manny Jacinto), the sexy and worldly drama teacher at her school.
When Peter and Emma meet by chance because their offices share an emergency stairwell, they decide to work together to break up these new couples. Peter will befriend Noah and be a flea in his ear, and Emma will volunteer at Logan's middle school production of Little Shop of Horrors and attempt to seduce him away from the jealous Anne. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before, because otherwise I'll have to cut this review short: Over the course of ostensibly hilarious shenanigans, they slowly begin to fall for one another, which is complicated by the machinations of their evil plan.
My immediate question is thus: why the fuck is this movie two hours long? While it might be the manifest destiny of superhero films to claim as many hours of our lifeforce as possible, the ever-expanding shores of their run times seem to exert a gravitational pull that drags out the length of everything else along with them. With a cleaner screenplay, I Want You Back could have been a tight 90 minutes and solved most of its problems in the process. For instance, any reasonable screenwriter would have had Peter and Emma decide on their plan in the scene where they meet in the stairwell, rather than spending 10 to 15 minutes just kind of wandering around with them shooting the shit first. Especially when those scenes of shooting the shit have nothing to offer beyond the most obvious choices (you better believe they sing Alanis Morisette's "You Oughta Know" at karaoke?).
Alas, I Want You Back's screenplay is probably its biggest liability. Every comic setpiece here is one that would have been rejected by American Pie 2 in 2001 for being too cliché, and would have been done better if that film had decided to include it in the first place. I Want You Back exists in this strange liminal space between sex comedy and chaste romcom that does not suit it one bit.
Another thing I Want You Back steals from superhero films is cinematography that actively rebels against displaying images in a satisfying way. The underlit digital cinematography isn't actively ugly, but it presents us with an insipid sheen that aspires and fails to reach the level of vulgar blandness that typifies most Netflix originals.
Like any of these generic streaming romcoms, I Want You Back lives and dies on the strength of its cast, and it has assembled an unusually strong one. Almost every single cast member is serviced in one way or another by the audience's awareness of their past career, especially Charlie Day and Jenny Slate. They're strictly on coasting mode here, but the comic goodwill they have built up over their collected decades in the business results in an excess of charisma and charm despite the characters really not having any romantic chemistry to speak of.
Jenny Slate is the MVP here, clearly ad-libbing over the script and saving as many scenes as the dialogue attempts to ruin. Her one slip-up is a moment of connection with Logan when she is forced to replace the tween actress last minute and sing "Suddenly, Seymour" during a tech rehearsal, impressing him with her performance. It's absolutely not her fault that Ellen Greene exists and that her performance as Audrey has been captured on camera and distributed to the masses, but she does and it was, so it's hard to be particularly impressed by Slate's rendition, alienating us from the entire crux of that scene.
The rest of the cast acquits themselves rather well, too. Manny Jacinto manages to spin his inimitable The Good Place performance and nail a character who is also an oblivious dope, but in such a different way that it showcases his excellent range. And I don't know if Scott Eastwood has harnessed untapped wells of comedy potential or if his wooden acting style has been well-harnessed by the director to service his meathead character, but he is atypically charming as hell. Gina Rodriguez and Clark Backo have more thankless roles here, but they are both entirely pleasant to watch just the same.
I Want You Back ultimately just barely ekes its way across the line into being worth watching, assuming you're completely tapped out on better romcoms. Certainly, if you're a viewer with a hide thickened by, say, a couple dozen Hallmark original movies, this will be a welcome confection.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: romcoms
