Worth: $12.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jenny Slate, Charlie Day, Gina Rodriguez, Scott Eastwood
Intro:
… your bog-standard rom-com that largely hangs on its cast to make things entertaining, which they are admittedly well-equipped
Charlie Day and Jenny Slate have come a long way since appearing in the likes of Horrible Bosses and Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. Their respective chaotic energies that have made them so memorable in the stand-up and sitcom spheres have allowed them an equally magnetic presence in films. The notion of pairing them together, in a rom-com no less, makes sense on the surface, especially with how knowingly-silly the plot around them is.
Day and Slate as Peter and Emma respectively are the worst-case scenario for the recently-dumped, in that they are so not over their past relationships that they’ve teamed up to sabotage the new relationships of their exes (Gina Rodriguez and Scott Eastwood) in the vain hope of getting them back.
In-between the fitness montages, what writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (who also penned the resonant Love, Simon) have to say about the characters, their circumstances, and just love in general, isn’t all that incisive. They take a rather blasé attitude towards the frankly ridiculous emotional problems of the leads, which starts out alright as a foundation for the comedy, but quickly wears thin. It’s not a story that particularly needs to be pushing towards two hours in running time, especially since the resolution is compacted into the last ten minutes.
It doesn’t help that the bulk of the film’s ideas (that aren’t a result of likely improv on-set) can be boiled down to the leads’ immaturities and being comfortable with themselves before they can be comfortable with anyone else. It’s the Judd Apatow formula all over again, only here, the memorable scenes are few and far between (Jenny Slate singing and a surprise Pete Davidson appearance are about it), and as a result of the formula being so well-worn, there are far better examples of it out there (Sleeping With Other People comes to mind, with its similarly-unprepared-for-a-relationship leads).
I Want You Back is okay. It’s your bog-standard rom-com that largely hangs on its cast to make things entertaining, which they are admittedly well-equipped to do, but the inevitable sense of déjà vu is likely to put more discerning audiences off. There’s nothing all that wrong with it, and within its frequently tacky sub-genre, that itself might be worthy of praise, but not enough for it to be worth searching for. Stumbling upon, perhaps.
