Failure to Launch
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Sarah Jessica Parker, Zooey Deschanel,
Terry Bradshaw, Kathy Bates
Director: Tom Dey
Critic's rating: 2 out of 10
Review by Chuck O'Leary
If Matthew McConaughey is as nice of a guy as most people
say, I feel kind of bad that I have to keep giving most of his movies
such negative reviews. I want to like McConaughey, but his terrible
taste in scripts makes it nearly impossible to write anything nice.
Case in point, Failure to Launch, a dismal comedy
without a single laugh. Playing like a watered-down entry in the
current trend of arrested-development comedies such as The 40-Year-old
Virgin and Wedding Crashers, the premise of Failure
to Launch has promise, but a decent premise turns out to be
the only thing this movie has. It's a total failure on all other
counts.
You know a movie's in trouble when its most
memorable moment comes when Terry Bradshaw appears bare-assed. And
you thought The Hills Have Eyes was scary.
McConaughey is Tripp, a 35-year-old boat salesman who still
lives at home with his parents (Bradshaw and Kathy Bates). But as played
by McConaughey, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Tripp. He's
handsome, employed, in great shape and has excellent social skills. The
horrible screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember -- this is their first
feature-film script and hopefully their last -- is too shallow to
give Tripp any kind of mental illness or addiction issues that would
normally be the cause of somebody of his age still residing with his
parents. Therefore, Tripp comes across as a boring, carefree leech.
Wanting to provide Tripp with some incentive to venture out
on his own, the parents hire Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker), a single woman who
makes a living pretending to be the girlfriend of guys like Tripp in hopes of
giving them enough confidence and motivation to leave the nest. Stupidly,
she supposedly gives her male clients all this extra confidence without ever
sleeping with any of them. Well, that's until she starts having genuine
feelings toward the hunky Tripp. Big surprise.
Relentlessly predictable and painfully unfunny, Failure
to Launch exhibits the feel of an awful 90-minute pilot for
a sitcom too bad to ever air.
