REVIEW | Friends With Kids

This is a strange movie. It’s two stars are so unknown over here that the studios instead decided to advertise their supporting cast (which makes sense seeing that it’s the Bridesmaids cast). It’s forever set in Autumn/Winter despite it’s summer release here and spring release stateside. It’s so realistic that it becomes incredibly depressing pretty early on and, like Bridesmaids but far more profoundly, tries to get comedy from the awfulness but it does become hard to laugh on occasion. Jennifer Westfeldt has one of the strangest, more confusing faces that isn’t normally something I would remark on but it actually distracted me frequently. The ending is so drawn out that I left the cinema laying out how I would have edited it to make it pacier and more emotionally impactful, and this is made even more incredible when there is fuck all time given to the period where she’s pregnant. The inevitable conclusion makes the challenges along the way daft and inconsequential, we are just left waiting for them to get over themselves and realise what their friends and the us as the audience realised ten minutes in.

But, beyond all of that, this is still a funny movie in places. Adam Scott is his normal Parks and Recreation/Party Down self, while Chris O’Dowd is excellent at every moment. Maya Rudolph really isn’t very funny, Jon Hamm is not as funny but in this best in the dramatic moments, while Kristen Wiig is far too talented a comedienne to be as ignored as much as she is here. This could have been a far funnier, yet less sweet movie had she been the lead, but this is Westfeldt’s movie and she, like the movie as a whole, is pretty funny, somewhat charming but never quite convinces.

Verdict: Spunk

DAN