Product: Prime
Rating: 3.0
...meh.
Prime (Ben Younger, 2005)Ben Younger's first film was Boiler Room, the unjustly obscure expose of stock scams that it mostly known these days for being one stop on Vin Diesel's meteoric rise to fame. It's much more than that, though, and if you've never seen it, it deserves being revisited.How, then, to explain Prime, Younger's second outing? Younger's wannabe romantic comedy gives us Lisa Metzger (Meryl Streep), a psychoanalyst who's counseling Rafi Gardet (Uma Thurman) through a messy divorce. Rafi perks up when she meets a younger man who lights her fire-- but it escapes both Rafi and Lisa that said younger man is Lisa's son David (One Tree Hill's Bryan Greenberg). Needless to say, the balancing act can't go on forever, and what's going to happen when everyone finds out about everyone else?This had the potential to be an interesting take on the love triangle, but instead it comes off rather as a mediocre adaptation of a Woody Allen movie. The script spends a lot of time obsessed with Lisa's family's archetypal (in some cases, verging on stereotypical) Jewishness as a source of its comedy. It never really gets offensive, but it does come off as cliched now and again. And the movie does have a number of funny scenes (mostly in David's interactions with his grandmother) and some good performances (look, especially, for Blood Diamond's Ato Essandoh in a small, but wonderful, role), but the whole never really coheres into anything other than your typical comedy of errors. **