I Love You, Man (2009/DreamWorks Blu-ray + DVD)
Picture:
B-/C+ Sound: B-/C+ Extras: D Film: D
One of
the least funny films in a while, John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man (2009) has Paul Rudd as a guy who has spent so much
time pursuing women that when he is finally ready to marry one, realizes he has
never had a male best friend. Now he is
on the quest to do so and the results should be hilarious… but are not.
Adam Samberg
(in the one good performance in the film) plays his openly gay brother who
tires to give him advice, but things really take an unfunny turn for the worst
when Jason Segel of the also rather unfunny Forgetting Sarah Marshall (reviewed elsewhere on this site) shows
up almost giving the same exact performance as the guy who might fit the bets
friend bill. If only he was not so
eccentric and boring!
The
script mocks everything from the rock band Rush, to Lou Ferrigno’s celebrity to
human sexuality and is more of a collection of one-liners than an actual
narrative. Segel thinks if he grins and
says something like it is funny, it will be funny. Instead, the silent beat he throws in after
every one-liner is as dead as his delivery when it should be dead-on. Instead, he just takes up space, much like
most of the text in the script to no point.
J.K. Simmons and Jon Favreau also star and cannot save it.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 image is softer throughout than it should be for a brand-new shoot, a
situation far worse on the anamorphically enhanced DVD which makes this even
harder to watch. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1
mix on the Blu-ray is on the weak side too, even for a dialogue (notice I do
not use the word joke) based mix. The
Dolby Digital 5.1 on both discs are even poorer, though an English option is
only on the DVD. Add all that up and this
is lame across the board.
Extras
include a making of featurette, extended scenes, deleted scenes, gag reel,
commentary by Hamburg, Rudd & Segel and a nine-part section redundantly
called “extras” and that was not funny either.
Never has there been a better time to fall out of “love”.
- Nicholas Sheffo
