Like baloney on your face but if you’re in a dips**t mood… She’s Out of My League is an adorable sad puppy of a movie, something that keeps you laughing but sighing in disbelief. Jay Baruchel, as über-dork Kirk, is the hero with the sad eyes who doesn’t have much experience. But he does have a monster ex-girlfriend that he is trying to get back with. The ex-girlfriend isn’t exactly a monster, but she’s definitely in the mid-range of the scale.
Kirk’s friends are generous enough to rate him a 5. He would get a 6 if he didn’t get subtraction points for having no ambition and driving a crappy car. Then he meets Molly (Alice Eve), a classified 10, who is not even aware that he is out on a date with her when they’re at a hockey game. How did this happen?
The script eventually gives supporting reasons as to why Molly, an event planner, would be interested in giving Kirk, a TSA security guard, a more than fair shot. In the stretched past realistic conventions of this scenario, Molly isn’t exactly a real girl but a fantasy girl who meets all the qualified insecurities you find in a movie like this. When Kirk and Molly are actually out on dates the dialogue has a cute-polite and dorky-polite polish. It’s so embarrassing watching Kirk make a move on Molly that it’s a relief to see her get on top in the make-out scene. Which ends in a spill, of course.
Broad as formula, the flick sinks down to bathroom humor just like any other comedy has been compelled to do since “American Pie.” Except this time the bathroom humor can at least be given credit for shear originality, thus construed by the shaving of Kirk’s nutsack. Yuk.
To its credit there are plenty of feel-good laughs in “League,” and if there’s anything that goes sour, it’s the third act that comes on too much as a strained heart-tugger, but it’s encouraging to watch Kirk grow a pair. This is not a bonafide classic entry in the geeks comedy canon, but if anything, this is a swell hangout movie. The hangout movie only amounts to a good time though if you have a bunch of friends to watch it with you – it helps if somebody is there to take the task as commentator to make fun of Kirk non-stop.
It helps that Alice Eve, on the cover of this month’s Maxim Magazine issue, is perky and sweet on top of being a blonde bombshell. I almost want to give it a half-star subtraction for having us gaze at Baruchel’s hideous body for long stretches. But it does keep in common to what the movie is striving to achieve in the first place: Embarrassing laughs.
104 Minutes. Rated R.
ROMANTIC COMEDY / INNER NERD APPEAL / WEEKEND SLACKER MOVIE
Film Cousins: “Lucas” (1986); “Can’t Buy Me Love” (1988); “American Pie” (1999); “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” (2009).
