Painful, pretentious tripe - if it weren't for JG-L, I would have puked.

Rating: 2/10 (4 March 2017)

Zooey Dechanel has got to be one of the most annoying actresses on the planet. Her "quirky" mannerisms that supposedly are her claim to fame, after about 10 minutes make you want to take up crack. And let's be clear, there is nothing even mildly humerus about this movie which for some unknown reason is called a romantic "comedy." Guaranteed you won't even crack a smile.
It goes from one banal situation to the next, all building up to a simple, easily understood conclusion -- he is smitten, she is not...bye bye boy. We should not have been tortured for what seemed like hours to get to this uncomplicated, uninteresting denouement. Everything in between is schlock and cloyingly creepy.
Joseph Gordon-Levit, an actor with some incredible chops, does his best to keep this thing from descending into pretentious stupidity, but in spite of his heroic efforts, he is unsuccessful. He handles the maudlin dialog as best he can, while his love interest seems to just wander thru her lines, totally unable to make you believe ANYONE would actually speak this inane dialogue. For all the effort of the cast (Levit much more so than Dechanel) to pull off dialogue that is so off-center, in the end, the sitcom-about-to-be-canceled quality of the thing becomes almost painful to watch. The only thing missing is the canned laugh track, while the director uses silly tech tricks in an attempt to make the mess seem "profound," like using spit screens with the word EXPECTATION on one screen and REALITY on the other and like adding intrusive narration that simply pops in with no apparent reason and in a voice that has a weird accent and timber which resembles one of those gravely trailer voice-over voices. There is even sequence where all of a sudden we are in a MARY POPPINS movie with the live characters actually breaking into choreographed dance, replete with a Disney-esque animated bird interacting with JG-L. The cumulative effect of all this is a disjointed, meandering, pretentious mess signifying nothing.
Bottom line...even if you find this title on Neflix for free, don't waste your time. If your girlfriend or significant other insists she wants to watch it (she might, it's been hailed as a "chick flick"), be sure you get a firm commitment to get something YOU want in return before you waste what I guarantee will feel like 3 hours of sloppy trash to you.