Earlier this year, a dark comedy called Ingrid Goes West was
quietly released to theaters. It was
fantastic. It starred Aubrey Plaza as the titular mentally ill young woman who
goes off her meds and decides to “reinvent” herself. She travels across the
country and begins obsessively stalking a model she saw on Instagram, going out
of her way to get as close to her as possible. In the process, Ingrid ruins the
lives of just about everyone she meets. It got great reviews and it’s one of my
favorite movies of the year.
Unfortunately, this is not a review of Ingrid Goes West. This is
instead a review of its bizarro-world evil twin: Literally Right Before Aaron.
Literally Right Before Aaron follows Ingrid almost exactly, but
with a noticeable difference. This movie seems to think its protagonist’s
behavior is cute and funny instead of clinically insane. America’s sweetheart
Justin Long stars as Adam, a down-on-his-luck everyman still grieving over his
breakup with Allison (Cobie Smulders) almost two years ago. Things take a turn
when she calls him to invite him to her wedding to her new partner Aaron. He’s
shocked. She moved on and he didn’t. In fact, it turns out he dated her
“literally right before Aaron” as one character explains to him. Get it? Like
the title! With the encouragement of his equally sociopathic dude-bro best
friend (John Cho), Adam travels to San Francisco to attend the wedding, and
hopefully win her back.
Again, the key flaw in this movie (aside from how unfunny
the ‘jokes’ are) is that it clearly doesn’t see anything wrong with Adam’s aggressively
wrong (and casually misogynistic) point of view. To a normal person, his plan
is self-absorbed and disturbing, and so is he. However, in the mind of
writer/director Ryan Eggold, these traits apparently make Adam the perfect fit
to be the protagonist of a romantic comedy, and an uninspired one at that.
While the details make it sound insane, the actual core plot is extremely
generic. Boy tries to “win back” his lost love from her new
seemingly-perfect-but-actually-secretly-a-jerk boyfriend. It’s a pretty paint
by numbers setup, it’s just that Eggold’s ‘wacky’ new twist is to have the boy
be a literal sociopath and his plan is to break-up an actually fully
functioning couple at their wedding. Romantic Comedy!
It’s not just Justin Long who’s crazy, though. It’s
genuinely all of the characters. Nobody in this movie talks or acts like real
people, and when they try, they legitimately sound evil. The meet-cute
flashback? It’s two people with no chemistry ruining each other’s day. The
scene where we’re supposed to see how quirky and fun Cobie Smulders is? That
features Smulders and Long playing a game where they hypothesize how they would
ruin the lives of the various strangers around them, an already terrible idea
of fun made worse by her answer: She’d break up a man’s marriage and give him
AIDS. Literally a thing that she says. To be funny. To make us like her. AIDS.
That being said, Luis Guzmán’s character (who is only in one
scene) is pretty likeable. So hats off to Mr. Guzmán. This movie would have
been better if it was about you.
What frustrated me most though, was how much potential it
had. The cast is comprised of very talented performers. Cobie Smulders is
great, John Cho is great, and both Kristen Schaal and Charlyne Yi are hilarious
comedians who are completely wasted in this movie. Even Justin Long can have
his moments in the right role (this was not the right role). The visual
direction is pretty impressive. Many of the montages and flashbacks all have an
indie music video vibe that was pretty cool to watch. It’s just the parts where
there are characters and dialogue that make the movie awful. Excellent
ingredients for a bad recipe. There’s no amount of references to The
Graduate that can save you from that.
In short, the main problem with Literally Right Before Aaron is
that it is an insane movie made by and for crazy people.
1 out of 5
