Our plot:
Amy is a (wait for it...) trainwreck. Idolizing her dad, she makes a joke of how her life revolves around sleeping around, smoking weed, and drinking too much.
BUT ALL OF THAT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE.
In typical romcom format, the girl gets swept off her feet by a guy. In this case, the guy is a sports surgeon named Aaron (Bill Hader). And then Amy is forced to reevaluate her life choices.
Um...that's kind of it.
The nice thing about Trainwreck is that it tries to stand the familiar trope of romcoms on its head--that being that the girl is completely taken by the guy and then has to make him see that commitment is the only way to live your life. By contrast, Amy is vehemently against being stuck with someone and Aaron (Bill Hader) is adorable in trying to win her over. As a couple, they are refreshingly normal in a lot of ways. Amy isn't overly emotional or being played by some ridiculously hot actress who ends up with somebody as humdrum as Bill Hader. And it's nice to see that whole thing work out for them in the end.
(I'm sorry, Bill Hader, I'm not insinuating anything here but you are
really unusually ordinary looking for a romantic lead, bless your heart.)
But for all the hype that they make in the trailers about how she sleeps around and drinks too much and does dumb stuff like that, the movie doesn't spend a ton of time indulging in Amy's behavior. Honestly the movie doesn't really revel in her terrible ways at all. And unlike movies that just roll in that kind of thing like Bad Santa or Bad Teacher (hmm...maybe they should've called this Bad Trainwreck...), Trainwreck seems to have too much heart to fully endorse its own joke. Amy's bad behavior, on the contrary, comes off as childish and inappropriate as opposed to funny. She has this fantastic boyfriend, a renowned surgeon, and while he's off doing responsible surgeon things she's hungover and smoking weed. It's supposed to be funny, but somehow it's kind of not.
Actually, come to think of it, I think the major problem with Trainwreck is that it tries too hard to be a romance when it should be more of a comedy. Whereas in Appataw's other movies you have ensemble casts building relationships and creating identities of their own, there just seem to be a TON of bit parts in Trainwreck. I barely recognized Tilda Swinton, who absolutely murders it as Amy's boss (I mean, duh, she's Tilda Fucking Swinton, why is she even in this movie?), John Cena has a hilarious bit part as her freakin boyfriend in the beginning, and one of the things I enjoyed most about the whole movie were the one-liners by LeBron James. But none of these characters really end up getting fully developed.
SERIOUSLY, HOW IS THIS TILDA SWINTON???
Unlike Appataw's Knocked Up or 40-Year-Old Virgin, there isn't any group of friends huddling around Amy. This seems to be a key component missing, as we're left to judge her behavior ourselves without the sounding board of any other people, besides the watery office colleague (Vanessa Bayer), her silent sister (Brie Larson) and her father (Colin Quin). Without the group banter, which makes Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin work so well, we're left to view Amy as a black sheep against the personalities of the other women characters who are either super conservative or don't have personalities at all.
Juuuust the twooo of uuuus.
Long story short, Trainwreck has too much heart to be a good comedy and too much raunch to be considered a good romance. Caught in the middle, we're left with some heavy character development that seems too heavy for a night of fun, and a lot of small, funny bits that don't quite string together to form a cohesive plot.
Eh. 6 outa 10. There were some funny parts, and Bill Hader is super endearing as the doofy, earnest sports surgeon, but this isn't as funny as I thought it was going to be.
