She’s Out of My League (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Mike Vogel
screenplay by Sean Anders & John Morris
directed by Jim Field Smith

by Jon Thibault

What happens when a beautiful, wealthy event planner meets a scrawny, socially maladroit, uneducated TSA security guard who's too uncoordinated to shave his own balls?

Love!

She's Out of My League is a loser-meets-goddess story that makes Can't Buy Me Love look like a masterpiece–and in this wretched genre, it sort of is. You already know the plot, but I'll run through the basic ingredients (showing pretty much the same effort exerted by screenwriters Sean Anders and John Morris): babe, nerd, implausible meet-cute, babe's disapproving brunette friend, nerd's three misfit friends, awkward moment with babe's parents, demeaning moment with babe's ex-boyfriend, date montage, dog-reaction shot, nerd's ex-girlfriend becomes jealous of babe and wants nerd back, nerd loses babe, revelation about self-worth, somebody runs through an airport, nerd gets babe back. Add no-name British director Jim Field Smith and lots of product placement, and–voila!–a truly shitty movie.

But She's Out of My League is even worse than the sum of its parts. The tone is unintentionally dark, and it would work well as a horror movie with very little tweaking. It's purportedly set in Pittsburgh but actually inhabits a hellish alternative universe wherein everyone is perverted, mean, violent, and/or batshit crazy. Not a single character shows any intelligence, emotional or otherwise. Physical beauty is extraordinarily rare, as the mere sight of love-interest Molly (Alice Eve) causes uncontrollable stuttering and hyperventilation in men and women alike; in the real world, Molly would wonder if she carried some exotic, airborne virus.

Out-of-her-leaguer Kirk (Jay Baruchel) isn't so much a lovable loser as a self-loathing halfwit. He's physically unattractive (imagine the alien in The Thing if it absorbed Richard Grieco and Stephen Hawking), so you'd think he'd follow genre protocol and make up for his repulsiveness with charm or a hidden talent. You'd be wrong. He and his friends, all well into their twenties, still rate women with numbers (Molly's a "hard 10"). After making out with Molly for a few seconds, he ejaculates in his pants (how cute!). He inexplicably beats the shit out of his ex-girlfriend and throws her off a moving golf cart into a wall (adorable!). It bears repeating that he is too stupid to shave his own nutbag and has to enlist requisite Fat Buddy (Nate Torrence) to do the manscaping–a creepy scene, given Torrence's pedophilic grin and Baruchel's sickly prepubescence. Though his behaviour is, at the very least, unattractive, compared to the other sideshow freaks that populate She's Out of My League, Kirk comes off like George-fucking-Clooney, and Molly falls head-over-heels.

Molly is pretty weird in her own right. Her parents are snobs, her sister's an alcoholic, her best friend's a vulgar bitch, and her ex-boyfriend's a narcissist, yet Molly emanates the kindness and innocence of a Disney princess. Any normal person trapped in this hateful world would curse God and suck on a tailpipe, but Molly floats gaily about, smiling at the surrounding grotesquery and occasionally speaking French. One wonders whether her angelic buoyancy isn't the studied facade of a psychopath, and she's one whimsical laugh away from stabbing a baby in the face.

All of this would be fine if She's Out of My League were funny or thought-provoking. It's neither. Both formulaic and perplexing, She's Out of My League is a film without an audience. It could have been a romantic comedy, but it utterly lacks romance–the frog never changes to a prince. It could have been a dumb-guy comedy, but it lacks nudity (save for Baruchel's ass), sex, and gross-out laughs, and it's burdened with a male protagonist who's a dislikeable tool. It could have been a racy teenage comedy, but it's rated "R." This leaves only masochists and prisoners of war, because you don't watch She's Out of My League, you are subjected to it. At the 39.53-minute mark, fearing for what remained of my frontal lobe, I paused the disc, ate a grapefruit, wept in a dark room, and slowly regained my sanity. Then I braved the rest of the film so you will never have to.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
Buy She's Out of My League on Blu-ray for someone you hate. The 2.40:1, 1080p transfer and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio make painfully apparent the movie's lazy cinematography and horrible score. Included in the supplementary material is a humourless commentary by Smith, during which he listlessly searches for something interesting to say. We learn that Marisa Tomei's brother has a small role, that much of the dialogue consists of lines shouted to the actors off-camera by Smith, and that "our production designer decided that Kirk's mum would be obsessed with owls." Also included on the Paramount platter are "Devon's Dating Show" (7 mins., HD), wherein the Fat Buddy gives dating advice; the most unfunny blooper reel in history (6 mins., HD); and five deleted scenes with optional director's commentary (4 mins. in toto, HD) that are arbitrary, as their inclusion in the finished product wouldn't have made a difference either way.

104 minutes; R; 2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1, Portuguese DD 5.1; English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; BD-50; Region-free; Paramount