How to Be Single Review
By Adam Yuster
I had fun watching How to Be Single. Call it a chick flick, call it Valentine’s Day fluff, whatever, I enjoyed it. It’s by no means a masterpiece. There are flaws—I’ll get into them later. But before you read on, I just thought we should set the record straight: How to Be Single is a fun movie.
The premise consists of a simple, yet original idea that we haven’t fully seen the likes of on film. How to Be Single is a romantic comedy about what it’s like to not be in a relationship. Kind of cool, right? We’re quickly introduced to our protagonists: Alice (Dakota Johnson), Lucy (Alison Brie), and Meg (Leslie Mann). Alice has just “gone on a break” from her relationship with her boyfriend (insert Friends joke here) and invokes the help of Robin (Rebel Wilson) to navigate the foreign world of clubs and bars. Meg, Alice’s sister, decides to have a baby on her own, but the matter gets complicated when she falls for a younger man. Lucy, who lives above the bar Alice and Robin frequent, develops a platonic relationship with a sexy man-child bartender that threatens to turn into something more.
On paper, we’ve all seen movies like this before. About a Boy nailed the man-child-in-love angle in 2002, and nothing can beat The Graduate when it comes to tales of older women’s relations with younger men. Where How to Be Single purports to be different is that unlike most rom-coms, the women have all the power. They’re the ones who choose whether each relationship lives or dies. How to Be Single desperately wants to be an ode to feminism, and it mostly is. There are a few pretty surprising moments for a rom-com (spoiler alert: the guy doesn’t always get the girl, and vice versa). But the biggest surprise? It’s actually funny. The script, while not top-notch, has a few laugh-out-loud moments, and it helps that the cast has the comedic chops to carry it. Rebel Wilson steals the show, playing what is basically a raunchier version of her Fat Amy character from Pitch Perfect. Leslie Mann shines here, too. Alison Brie is good, though criminally underused. And while the obvious weak link here is Dakota Johnson, her character is still amiable enough that you forgive the actress for her shortcomings.
The largest problem with How to Be Single is it doesn’t have enough faith in itself. The film plays it safe. Too often, it falls back on genre conventions and predictability, becoming a generic romantic comedy instead of the subversive Bridesmaids-esque film it had the potential to be. For example, even though the movie is about being single, 90% of the conversations between the leads revolve around the men in which they’re interested. Additionally, all of the bonding between these female friends occurs at clubs or bars where our protagonists’ main goal is to, you guessed it, sleep with men. I’m perfectly fine with a movie celebrating women’s sexual empowerment, but in a film that literally has the word “single” in the title, wouldn’t you expect at least one scene where these women relate to each other without the male elephant in the room?
That’s my major gripe, but another significant issue is that the movie is bloated. There is simply too much here. It stretches on for an hour and fifty minutes when the average rom-com is an hour and thirty, yet it still feels like some of the plotlines go unresolved (by “some plotlines”, I’m referring to Lucy’s; I will never get over the fact that they underused Alison Brie, one of the funniest under-the-radar people in Hollywood today). Worse yet, Dakota Johnson’s Alice gets the focus for the bulk of the movie’s runtime, which is perplexing, because her story is the least intriguing. The director could’ve easily shaved minutes off Alice’s arc and ended up with a faster-paced film.
Which highlights the ultimate tragedy of How to Be Single. A few easy fixes could’ve made this into a much better film. Cut some of Alice’s story. Elongate or lose Lucy’s. Stick with the unpredictable, non-conventional nature implied in the title. Of course, that’s all too late to fix now. As is, How to Be Single is pleasant enough for date-night. It’s not essential, but if you see it On Demand or on Netflix, give it a watch. You’ll have fun.
Rating: 6/10
