Funny woman Amy Schumer effortlessly makes the
transition from her successful TV career to being the brightest new star to hit
the big screen this year in what is destined to be one of the summer’s blockbuster
romantic comedies. If that is not enough, she wrote the very hilarious script
herself.
Amy plays Amy a magazine writer for one of those
obnoxious self-congratulatory ‘Lads’ magazines who has never forgotten the
mantra that her rather sleazy father drummed into her when she was a young girl
‘monogamy is not realistic.’ So daughter
like father with her insatiable sex-drive Amy adopts a strict love–em-and-leave-em
policy manipulating a never ceasing line of hot dates into pleasuring her
before she ups and disappears never ever sleeping over with any of them. The
one time she breaks her rule and wakes up in strange bedroom with its walls
plastered with football insignia she begs ‘please don’t let this be a Dorm
room’.
One day she is assigned to write a profile on a
surgeon who specializes in putting famous athletes together again after they have
got injured. It’s a tad more serious than the fluffy stuff that she is used to
writing about but she dare not argue with her fearsomely aggressive editor and
her foul-mouth expletives. (A shockingly
wonderful Tilda Swinton who could give any ‘Real Housewife’ a run for their
money.)
Amy is determined not to like Aaron but cannot stop
herself and when dinner and drinks follow the interview she invites herself
home to his house afterwards. Not only
that she allows him to persuade her to stay the night, and next morning at her
Office she is deeply regretting it. It had been the first time that she had ever
had sex whilst still sober, and worst still, she had enjoyed it.
Now there is even more role reversal as Amy cannot
understand why she actually wants to see him again as this is an unprecedented
feeling for her, whilst Aaron is being congratulated by his fiends that he has
finally met someone after a two year dry spell.
His best friend is LeBron James who is playing himself and surprisingly
enough he does a very good job of it.
Well, it may not totally be the real James as it is hard to imagine him
as a penny-pinching guy who insists on splitting the restaurant check to the
dime before dashing home to watch 'Downton Abbey' with his teammates.
Amy has been happy playing the field and enjoying her
own bad behavior, but there are secondary plot lines with her sister, who took
an opposite route and married ‘safely’ to a very sensible man and even took on
his precocious son, plus their father’s health is failing and the siblings have
to put in an assisted living home. If
this is meant to try to persuade Amy to change her ways and conform before it
is too late, it fails. Panic not, after
she panics about being swept away by her too-nice-for-words Doctor and losing
sight of her slutty single days, their break up is followed by a ‘make up’ but one
very much in Amy’s own style.
Amy simply shines on the screen and although she is
best in the more frenetic mad banter scenes, she proves she can hold her own
when it comes to getting all romantic and emotional. She gives a powerhouse performance, which is
complemented by a funny, but understated, turn by Bill Hader as Aaron the man who
may eventually tame her. I am still in
something of shock discovering Tilda Swinton’s yet untapped gift for comedy in
all her scene-stealing moments.
Directed by Judd Apatow, considered the master of this
genre, but for once it would have better if he hadn’t been quite so formulaic
in his direction too and let Amy’s own voice come through more. That said, it is still a gloriously wonderful
movie that shows what a total charmer this breath of fresh air really is.
★★★★★★★★
★★★★★★★★
