She’s Out of My League | Romantic Comedy | rated R (A,L) | starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller | 1:44 mins
Airport TSA agent Kirk (Jay Baruchel, Undeclared) does a good deed for beautiful passenger Molly (Alice Eve, barely choking back a British accent) which gets her attention and soon before he realizes it, and much to the shock of his family and friends, the go-nowhere dork is dating the stunning blond. Problem is she’s a 10 and – according to Kirk’s best friend Stainer (T.J. Miller), he’s a 5, maybe a 6, and jumping anything more than 2 points violates the rules of nature.
The pairing of a beautiful woman with a dorky or average guy was an unspoken staple of family sitcoms for decades. Judd Apatow brought that formula to the big screen and tried to pass it off as reality as well but was greeted with the shrill cries of dorks on the internet who – rightly – called out the relationship dynamic as an unrealistic depiction. Not an Apatow movie, even though it stars Apatow player Baruchel (doing a fine job carrying the movie), but clearly inspired by them, She’s Out of My League is about nothing more than this very phenomenon. Is it a reality that only exists in pop culture, a reality created by pop culture, or a reality created by women trying to pump up their own image? Oh, leagues exist in some way or another, but relationships are an alcohol fueled happy hour debate that is far more interesting than the shallow, simple-minded one-liners used to explain it in this movie.
League is not a funny movie. At all. The banter between the Kirk’s loser friends is typical of a bargain basement Apatow clone. But one of those half-done, messed up clones that crawled out of the tank with 3 arms, 1 eye and just a trail of sludge where the legs should be. The material hasn’t been mined for the deep-seeded anger and neurosis an Apatow movie would be. The back and forth between Kirk and his embarrassing family is typical. The dating hijinks and macho bravado between Kirk and Molly’s typically studly ex-boyfriend is typical – though a scene where Baruchel keeps getting confused for a waiter is kind of amusing. The movie’s 2 trailer-ready gross-out gags are also typical. Thankfully, there are only two of them. In fact, despite it’s R-rated language, League is actually quite tame and sweet. Mercifully, it leans off the comedy and onto the romance, which is not a bad move for this movie because the romance is what it does best.
As absurd as the premise may seem, there really isn’t a point in the movie where I rolled my eyes in disbelief at Kirk and Molly’s relationship. The nimble, stripped down screenplay (by Sean Anders of the far superior Sex Drive) does a decent job of getting them together and bonding them over hockey, life goals and family in a believeable way. Given they’re from two different universes Baruchel and Eve even have workable chemestry. The movie even gives us a realistic character motive for Molly to fall for Kirk instead of the usual “he’s just a good guy” pabulum. Maybe it’s the recent rancid romantic comedies we’ve been subjected too, but League gets many of these core genre requirements righter than a lot of them. Not great, but it works. Including it’s affectionate musical montages.
It’s going to surprise no one that She’s Out of My League ends with (brace yourself) a race to the airport to keep one of the leads from getting on a plane with the wrong person after the make-up-to-break-up fight. It’s all about as tired and cliche as you can imagine. Except there’s a gender roll reversal here in which Molly is very often the one trying to win over Kirk (yeah) and the setting of the climax is worked into the fabric of the movie early on. Even the make-up-to-break-up scene, which usually comes out of nowhere, feeling forced and contrived in every other movie, is simply the inevitable coming to a head of this movie’s core theme (Kirk’s feelings of insecurity) here. And in the end, while not the smartest thing in the room, League has a level-headed and sweet take on the whole dilemma of leagues and how it is shaped by one’s self-confidence. She’s Out of My League is a passable, sweeter more realistic romantic fantasy in a blistering mine field of far worse rom-coms.