The Rebound

With the current dry desert of decent romantic comedies, I would imagine that to make one which surpasses what we have recently experienced in the world of film would not be too tough a task to handle. We have had Did You Hear About The Morgans?, The Bounty Hunter, Valentine's Day, Leap Year, The Ugly Truth, and The Back-Up Plan, each of which were proven to be lifeless duds eaten alive by ferocious, sharply-fanged critics.

Yes, we have had the occasional success such as Knocked Up and 500 Days of Summer, but these are shockingly only two which I can remember off the top of my head. To be fair, originality in what is more often than not a corny genre is a tad difficult, but as shown in the highly admirable couple I just mentioned, it is achievable.

And so, writer and director Bart Freundlich, the filmmaker who brought us World Traveler, Trust The Man and Catch That Kid (please kill this man) has decided to give the rom-com wagon a ride with his new feature entitled The Rebound. His twist on the formulaic genre is that, wait for it, the two leads have a fifteen year age difference. Yes, fifteen years. That's supposed to be shocking and scandalous but, umm, it's not. It's fairly normal actually.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is Sandy, a forty year old who has just found out her husband (Sam Robards) is having an affair. Bringing her son and daughter with her, she moves to New York to start anew and buys an apartment atop a coffee shop. There, she befriends one of the workers, 25 year old Aram (Justin Bartha), a guy who's uncomfortable in his own shoes and unsure of what to do with his life.

Aram ends up being the full-time babysitter of Sandy's two children (get it? He's got a twelve year old's job) while she is busy at work all day. Aram bonds well with the little youngsters and in not much time becomes attached to them while Sandy goes out on several unsuccessful dates with random guys. But soon enough, Sandy begins suspecting that she may have feelings for her male nanny and that he is undergoing the same thing.

Do I really need to explain the rest of the plot? I don’t even need to post a spoiler warning. They resist each other at first, but this doesn't last long and they have sex, they go out, they fall in love, they get made fun of for their age difference, there's some trouble in paradise, they break up and yadda yadda yadda. Formulaic.

Right, first off, Zeta Jones and Bartha have approximately zero chemistry together, which is basically the one factor a rom-com relies on. So that's a bit of an epic fail. You can see that there's meant to be this sexual tension between them, but this never comes across like it should and it almost completely slaughters the movie. It's not necessarily the age gap, it's just that their relationship and strong feelings for each other don't feel real or convincing enough for us to give a hoot. It's all fake Hollywood fluff.

The characters don't feel like they have any depth to them, they come across as cardboard cut-outs, taking away the necessary likability factor. Zeta-Jones and Bartha are alright enough, it's just the weak script that screws them over. Our two leads think they're in a much better movie than they really are, which makes it quite saddening watching them on-screen.

The two kids, played by Andrew Cherry and Kelly Gould are annoying as hell, constantly asking questions, being unspeakably intrusive and, even for little kids, say the most inappropriate things at the most inappropriate times. They're pretty much the two children from BBC's Outnumbered times a thousand. As a matter of fact, these two younglings are not the only inappropriately natured characters in the movie, as pretty much everyone says idiotic things which widely stretch the movie's logic and momentarily take it out of realism.

"I had sex with your mom," Aram loudly shouts in a busy bowling alley. "They're gonna give me a new asshole," Aram's father says when the children are sitting opposite him. "Nice ass, coffee boy!" Sandy's friend yells across the street. Why would they say these things? These characters aren't friggin' real!

The film also pointlessly reduces itself to vulgarity in the hopes of receiving a naughty snigger from childish viewers, but instead of this, what happened with me, myself an extraordinarily childish individual, is I groaned and rolled my eyes. When the characters just constantly curse or a homeless guy whips out his cock, it simply comes across as desperate.

It doesn't have the keen wit of Knocked Up or the imagination and creativity of 500 Days of Summer, both of which depended on intelligence and brains to gain laughs from the audience. Indeed, they had their naughty moments, but these did not seem out of place as they very much do in The Rebound.

The movie just doesn't work, almost everything about it is wrong. After a promising opening ten minutes which managed to make me giggle and convinced me that the rest would be a lot of fun, the film falls apart and becomes rather tiring by the 60 minute mark. It's not really that funny and the story is weak as hell with the characters not interesting enough to keep it going. The only interesting thing is the fact that the tables have turned for Zeta-Jones. She's usually going after pensioners, not kids straight out of college.

4/10