Reviews

The movie really tries to sell you on Ken being a good bloke and make him likable, but it doesn't really give him anything to do that is likable, and certainly didn't sell me on him having to live so he could 'go do some good'. They just rely on the fact that he's played by an attractive actor.

I'd love to see a whole movie with Ken because they actually built him to be pretty cool and complicated.

This movie really shows it's age with the slurs and fat phobia as well. It's just really off-putting and spoils what could have been quite fun for a couple of hours.

The thing that kind of redeemed it was the end with the movie set. It helped that it didn't rely on the Ken character.

Firstly, the actors were good and I'd love to watch them in something else but this movie wasn't great. It did try to deal with important issues, but didn't actually do it very well.

The two characters seemed to have sexual chemistry but you didn't really see them connect on much else, and they seemed to just fall into wanting to be parents together. I get that it sometimes happens that way in real life, but still.

My biggest problem with the movie was that the characters issues never seemed to be dealt with. Elena has some self esteem issues around her age and womanhood that's not even touched on other than the how it relates to her fertility, and her fear of abandonment doesn't really get much room either.

Shane is a man-child who thinks relationships should be perfect which is seriously naive for a doctoral student and he seems to come from a place of privilege and expects everything to come easily. His attitude gets a bit of a ding when his dad tells him his parents fought sometimes and we're supposed to think that fixes everything.

In the end these two characters got back together, but to see them as anything more than two damaged people clinging to a messed up relationship is hard.

It's a really well put together movie with some top notch actors, but I kind of wish they had done more to make the end result less expected. The fact is, if you're genre savvy at any level you can figure out who's going to come out alive in the end. If they'd had the confidence to introduce a few more characters as fully rounded people and then surprised us it would have felt more real, rather than pandering to the power fantasy.

Honestly, I knew I was going to like this when they hung a lampshade on the whole 'winning at chess so we know how smart the protagonist is' trope. Even the mistake that Howard makes to escalate things is in character for the softer version of himself.