Just Friends Review
by Steve Rhodes (Steve DOT Rhodes AT InternetReviews DOT com)November 21st, 2005
JUST FRIENDS
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
In JUST FRIENDS, directed by Roger Kumble (CRUEL INTENTIONS), Chris (Ryan Reynolds) is a fatty with a friend, and, not just any friend, but Jamie (Amy Smart), the hottest girl in school. The story starts in 1995 at graduation time at a New Jersey high school. With his double chin in danger of dragging the ground, Chris tumbles around in bed with Jamie just like they've always done since they were little tikes. As she accidentally flashes her panties several times, Chris's eyes get almost as large as his rotund tummy. Yes, he'd like their relationship to be more than just friends, but, in a kiss of death, she thinks of him as the functional equivalent of her brother. In the obligatory scene in which his true intentions for her are accidentally revealed in front of his classmates, he is ridiculed as just a joke, especially by the jocks who rule the social structure.
Well, cut to ten years later, when Chris has dropped a hundred pounds -- I did too, but that's about all I have in common with the plump or the slender Chris. Chris now is a stud machine who picks up girls like they are candy at Christmas and keeps them just about as long it takes to devour them.
A plane mishap causes Chris, now a record company exec, and his hot but daffy singer Samantha James (Anna Faris) to end up stuck in his old home town for the holidays. Of course, he will run into Jamie, and the two of them will eventually hook up. But nothing in JUST FRIENDS, a surprising and over-the-top comedy, happens in quite the way you'd expect.
Faris, a star of the SCARY MOVIE series, is downright scary again. This time she plays a chick so outrageously and physically stupid that she could kill a guy she's trying to make out with. Samantha carries a Taser, and, trust me, she is just the type of nutcase who you don't want to see armed.
As social satire, the movie works well enough, but it is as a comedy that it really delivers the goods. Our audience was laughing loudly and frequently, and I was laughing right along with them. Reynolds (VAN WILDER) seems to know just how to play a joke to make it work. And Smart (ROAD TRIP), as his companion, radiates oodles of innocent charm while always holding her own against him. Also quite good is Chris Marquette as Chris's brother. Their physicality together as they horse it up rings particularly true.
This good-spirited film stays well-within its PG-13 rating, so that it's always cute but never raunchy. It has a few nice gross-out moments, with the best being an overmedicated Samantha with too much green toothpaste in her mouth. The physical humor is consistently good, even in the simplest episodes, such as when Chris and Jamie's first date ends in the dreaded "kiss-hug limbo."
This is not the best of the holiday movies, but it is unpretentious humor that works and that will leave you respecting yourself afterwards. It's just sweet and silly fun.
JUST FRIENDS runs 1:36. It is rated PG-13 for "sexual content including some dialogue" and would be acceptable for kids around 10 and up.
My son Jeffrey and his girlfriend Yasmin, both 16, gave it *** 1/2. Jeffrey, who kind of wished the movie had been rated R, said that he particularly liked the way the characters could make you so angry at them that you would really laugh. Yasmin commented on how much of the comedy was stuff that she had never seen done before.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Wednesday, November 23, 2005. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and the Camera Cinemas.
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