I Love You, Man (**½)

Directed by: John Hamburg
Starring: Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones, Jaime Pressley, Jon Favreau, J.K. Simmons, Andy Samberg
Seen: April 29th 2009

**½ Out of ****

I Love You, Man is a great comedy that falters from about halfway through. The humour is very strong, but repetition of certain ideas start failing things after about 50 minutes, as the same vein of comedy goes on and on. Make no mistake, the film is extremely funny (and crude in some places), but certain situations are just funny once, maybe twice.

Paul Rudd plays Peter Klaven, a real estate agent who has always been a girlfriend guys, somehow never really striking up a big friendship with any males, which is a problem for him, since he has no one to pick as best man (for the sake of the movie you have to believe that one’s brother and father, both of which Peter has a good relationship with, won’t do at all), and thus has to search for one. Peter is also one of the most awkward people you’re ever likely to see on the big screen, continuously making a laughing stock of himself when he tries to talk smack or make up nicknames for people that are absolutely ridiculous and conversation-stopping (this is initially extremely funny and cringe-inducing, but gets a bit tired eventually).

Peter’s quest to find a best man lands him in some pretty awful scenarios, as one ‘man-date’ his mother sets him up on actually goes in for the good night kiss after word, tongue and all, and that is just the most overt of multiple scenes of mistaken/misguided/confused sexual identity. Enter Sydney Fife (Segel), an adult child who comes to one of Peter’s open house showings to pick up divorcees, and since Peter is looking for a friend, and Sydney seems like a good guy, the two find friendship almost at first sight, bromance style. This is a romantic comedy between two heterosexual men, with almost all the usual romance elements, but this time it’s boy meets boy, boys like each other, something goes wrong, boys fix it, boys make up. Does that sound extremely gay? Yes it does, intentionally so, as the movie does it in exactly the same way, but everything remains on a platonic friendship level between the two.

Even though the film is funny and quite entertaining all the way through, it loses steam at the halfway mark, as the film reverts to the usual romantic comedy plot twists, and the originality of the idea starts (however slowly) going out the window. My final verdict? Fun, very funny, but ultimately forgettable.