Man oh man, where the fuck do I begin?
For starters, let me say that I now respect Amy Schumer less because of “Trainwreck” — not that she gives a rat’s ass, otherwise she wouldn’t have let this pile of cinematic excrement go anywhere past the cutting-room floor, but yeah. My respect for her has diminished.
Let me explain why before you scroll way down to the comment section and start fingerbanging your keyboard to tell me why it was the funniest/best/most empowering movie.
Contrary to popular belief, “Trainwreck” does not give audiences a protagonist who unapologetically puts it all out there and refuses to adhere to societal norms.
Amy Townsend, the movie’s anti-heroine, apologizes a lot, actually. So much that it becomes grating. But her apologies are half-assed, like her blowout, and they lack the requisite emotional vulnerability and self-awareness of an effective apology.
For those who have yet to see the movie, let me introduce Townsend. She is, in a nutshell, a caricature of all the bad habits society ostensibly frowns up.
Her outfits always fall two inches short of business casual. She’s rarely far from her last or her next drink. She sleeps around (but never does the sleep-over part because that would be naive and yucky, of course). She smokes weed and hints at a dalliance with blow.
But she does none of these at her own accord.
It’s all because of her alcoholic, womanizing father, with whom she identifies. So despite the crocodile tears at his funeral (oops, spoiler alert — cry me a fucking river), it’s plain to see that the subconscious driver of her self-destructive behavior is a medley of garden-variety daddy issues.
Maybe my expectations going in were high and anything short of perfection would’ve been disappointing , but to say that would be a cop-out, if not a lie altogether.
I had few expectations. Sure, I expected laughs because of the hilarious cast and talented director (Judd Apatow), but I was relatively in the dark about all other aspects of the movie: never saw a trailer, didn’t read a synopsis, didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes’ freshness rating and, aside from skimming a write-up in The New Yorker, didn’t read reviews.
“Trainwreck” spends 122 minutes chasing its own tail, trying to figure out what the hell it wants to be. It vacillates between sentimental and irreverent but fails to commit wholeheartedly to either one.
It’s not snarky enough to be satire, like “They Came Together,” but it’s not earnest enough to be heartwarming, like “How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days.” (Shut the fuck up, you know you liked that movie.)
I laughed hysterically many times — like, for example, during every scene with John Cena, Tilda Swinton or LeBron James — but I cringed even more often. The humor was not enough to make up for the movie’s overall mediocrity, which feels almost intentional, like a cheap ploy to feel relatable to the American everyman/everywoman.
The truth is that I don’t think “Trainwreck” even wants to commit to being irreverent or sentimental.
It’s fine just shrugging its way through the shitty storyline, which gets lazier and more predictable by the minute.
Amy Schumer and whoever the fuck else wrote this screenplay didn’t want to choose between one thing or the other. Or maybe they just chose to be ambiguous and, therefore, an actual trainwreck, which would be meta.
But I fucking doubt it.
