Something Borrowed Review

As I sat down at the press screening of Luke Greenfield’s “Something Borrowed” I took a moment and scanned the.  The majority of the crowd consisted of women in their twenties. It was a microcosm of what the auditoriums will probably look like on this film’s opening weekend.

And why shouldn’t it? The movie has all the fixings for a sweet, feel good romantic comedy. The protagonist is a workaholic brunette who is letting life pass her by; her friend is a blonde partier who gets what she wants. The male love interest is charming and attractive. Then there are the two best friends: the brunette’s friend is zany but caring, and the love interest’s friend is a total douche. You almost don’t have to even have to see the movie; you can probably make up a pretty good version yourself.

But to Greenfield’s and screenwriter Jennie Snyder’s   credit the movie (based on the novel by Emily Giffin) doesn’t get too depressing, which is always a good thing in a rom-com, and it’s beautifully filmed on location in the Hamptons and Manhattan, the epicenter for romantic comedies.

However, much like a period drama, rom-coms are only as good as their main characters and most of the main characters in “Something Borrowed” are not that interesting. Ginnifer Godwin, tries her best playing Rachael the workaholic brunette who is always letting things slip away to her perfect, blonde partier friend Darcy (Kate Hudson) and she’s somewhat likable but in the long run her clichéd character becomes annoying. She gets put in a bad situation when she sleeps with her friend from law school, Dex (Collin Egglesfield) who is also Darcy’s fiancé because they have feelings for each other and…you know the story.

Though, honestly I didn’t really care that Rachael betrayed Darcy. Granted Kate Hudson played the role well, but Darcy was really unlikable and spends half the movie intoxicated. (Every other scene, she gives some drunken speech.) You wonder why Rachael is friends with her, better yet why Dex is marrying her.

And talk about an uninteresting love interest, Egglesfield gave an utterly boring, emotionless performance. In every one of his scenes, he stands there with his hands in his pockets, with a superficial smile carved on his face. I was waiting for him to pull out a bottle of cologne and start talking about it. All he offered was eye candy to the twenty somethings. Nothing but a cardboard cut out.

The only good character in the whole film was Rachael’s male best friend Ethan, played wonderfully by John Krasinski. Yes I know his character was a cliché, like the rest but Krasinski’s kooky and considerate performance (seen on the TV show “The Office”) made me care about him. He wasn’t in any of the main drama, just on the sidelines to give Rachael consultation and he was the only one that said anything funny.  It’s a shame he wasn’t in the movie more.

When the movie ended I could hear the conversations that the audience members were having, most talking about how they enjoyed it and thought it was sweet. And that’s all it was, a candy movie. No different than males liking a shoot em up action flick. But believe me there’s better candy out there.