He's Just Not That Into You

Review by Jason Donner

I loathe the romantic comedy and it's movies like this that only add to my white-hot hatred of what has to be the laziest of all movie genres. It's doudy, it's clunky, and its predictable through and through. Rarely is anything in this genre surprising or worth watching.  The most you can hope for is something cute or funny.

Take He’s Just Not That Into You for example.  The entire movie is made up of a paper thin story (excuse me, four paper-thin stories) that are stretched thinner by a cast too darned big for the movie to deal with.   Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connoly, Bradley Cooper, Ginnifer Goodwin, Scarlet Johansson, Kris Kristofferson, and Justin Long all share screen time and while I actually like everyone in the cast, the result is a movie far too shattershot and attention deficit to be engaging on even a rudimentary level

There are four couples with different stories in this movie all squeezed into two hours and there’s just not enough time to become emotionally invested in a single one of them  in this annoying and overlapping story. I don’t even want to try to summarize the plot because it would turn this tiny and somewhat interesting review into boring novel.

I seriously felt at times like I was watching a full season of a television soap opera compressed into two hours. The talented cast tries and fails to save the project that just doesn't congeal into anything that surprises even once.

In the end, you’re left with plotlines tangled into hopeless knots, the victim of too many threads and too many actors shoved into too little of a movie. There are moments in the movie which makes it passable as an afternoon's entertainment, but on the whole it’s buried under sappiness, clichés, and predictability.