Worth: $3.00
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Cast:
Dylan Sprouse, Virginia Gardner, Austin North, Brian Austin Green, Samuel Larsen, Libe Barer
Intro:
… a romantic comedy where both the romance and the comedy miss the mark by a mile.
College student by day, underground bare-knuckle boxing champ by night, Travis Maddox (Dylan Sprouse) is known across campus as a womaniser and a heartbreaker. That is until Abby (Virginia Gardner), naïve, studious, and fresh off the bus from Las Vegas, catches his attention during a fight and somehow manages to keep it. Determined to win Abby’s affection despite her repeated rejections, Travis persuades her to make a bet with him: if he loses his next fight, Travis will quit his pick-up artist ways and stay celibate for a whole month. But if he wins, Abby must spend every night of that month sleeping in his bed.
“I’m sorry, I thought this might be a fun idea,” Travis says to a sulky Abby when he inevitably wins the match.
“Well, it wasn’t,” is Abby’s reply. And doesn’t that just sum it up.
The premise is far-fetched and improbable, but no more so than dozens of other romantic comedies that finagle their leads into improbable situations to get them together. The screenplay is based on the novel of the same name, Beautiful Disaster, which is the first book in the “Beautiful” series by Jamie McGuire.
There’s a distinctly Wattpad feel to it all, the kind of New Adult fiction where billionaires, boy band members and bad boys all romance the unsuspecting girl next door. Think Fifty Shades of Grey, After, and The Kissing Booth, which is entirely fitting given director Roger Kumble has teamed up with Dylan Sprouse once before on After We Collided.
In fact, Kumble is an old hand at romantic comedies and teen dramas both, and after co-writing and directing 1999’s Cruel Intentions he should be especially adept at navigating the minefield of manipulation, seduction and bets gone awry. This story, however, co-written by Kumble and Julia Hart (Miss Stevens, Stargirl), is something a little less Machiavellian and a lot more vicious.
The two leads manage to say their lines with a straight face, which might just be the greatest achievement of the film. There’s nothing cute in the way Abby and Travis meet, from the word go, he’s aggressive and controlling in his pursuit of her. Their romance glorifies the toxic trope of “you don’t know him like I do, he’s different with me”. Abby gets glimpses of Travis’s softer side, watching him sweetly say Grace at the table with his family, but the casual domestic violence with the occasional rape joke thrown in, speaks volumes. Their budding relationship swings between playful and intense, but Abby’s cringey dialogue and Travis’s Andrew Tate-esque behaviour are an unpleasant enough combination to ruin any appeal. What we’re left with is a romantic comedy where both the romance and the comedy miss the mark by a mile.
