She's Out Of My League (15)

Dir. Jim Field Smith, USA, 104mins, 2010         
              
Cast: Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel, Lindsay Sloane

Review by Matthew Rodgers

Stop me if you‘ve heard this one before. A likeably geeky teenage boy who is one part of a group of friends that are so clichéd they could be labelled, “crude friend”, “fat friend” and “good looking friend”, finds himself in the sexual pursuit of an inexplicably hot girl in order to shake the dreaded “V for Virgin” label. American Pie you say? You could have also had elements of Sex Drive , Hot Tub Time Machine, Road Trip, and most other teen comedies of the last ten years.

The only thing that She's out of My League attempts to do differently is make the object of said affection more than a pneumatic narrative device. So we have Molly (Alive Eve), the daughter of a rich aviation expert and friend to top-class NHL Ice Hockey players, who upon leaving her phone at airport security has a chance meeting with our wiry Casanova, Kirk (Jay Baruchel). This leads to a burgeoning friendship and the possibility of more, depending on whether Kirk can handle his own insecurities and those forced upon him by his friends, parents, and Molly. The twist appears to be that she genuinely likes him and even more surprising is that we believe it.

There is something undeniably sweet about this movie and it's not hard to pinpoint Baruchel and Eve as the reasons why. He does his best despite some erratic plot-lines and the fact that he actually has a personality as compared to the aforementioned two-dimensional friends makes it easy to root for him. She couldn't be further from her hideous turn in Sex and the City 2 and seems the logical choice to take on the Reese Witherspoon mantle of rom-com queen. Here she is full of sass and consistently engaging.

Everything else about this smacks of “video rental”. It's predictable and formulaic – set pieces include such favourites as “meeting the parents” and “final reel dash to the airport”. its only decent jokes come from a character quoting classic Disney movies and it's extremely surprising that without any marketable names on the cast list this even achieved a cinema release.