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| Grade: D- |
*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.
"I should have gotten a haircut,” the mop-headed Luke Matheny said to uproarious laughter upon winning the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for God of Love. That line exhibited the same kind of quirky allure that likely gained the whimsical, black-and-white short its golden statue. The film is about a crooner and darting champion who faces difficulty in attracting the girl of his dreams. Played with a goofy sense of naiveté by the big-haired Matheny and infused with a subplot involving magic, God of Love’s simple look at romance was quite charming. Four years later, Matheny delivers his feature film debut with Lovesick, which stars Matt LeBlanc as another man who has everything in his life but love. But Matheny struggles to stretch that brief but potent whimsy into feature length. Underserved by a paper-thin script and tepid humor, and stripped of any fantastical elements that could conceal the premise’s childishness, Lovesick is as disappointing a return as one can imagine for this formerly auspicious young filmmaker.
LeBlanc plays Charlie Darby, an elementary school principal who is a true American hero in the eyes of the students. Charlie is funny, loving, and compassionate. Everything in his life seems to be going well, but his luck with women is rotten and all his past relationships have ended in bitter breakups. Charlie, with his disarming smile and graying hair, is ripe for settling down—a notion that the film will not stop verbalizing ad nauseum in its opening minutes.
But at this stage in life, Charlie has decided never to fall in love again and only spend time with women he doesn’t find attractive. Thus, Lovesick launches an avalanche of putrid and contrived comedic set-pieces—the most egregious of which is a painfully unfunny and grotesque scene where his companion at a wedding – a woman who has no issues discussing her bowel movements loudly in public – happens to be racist; she calls the brown waiters “Bin Laden” and pats them down in search for bombs. After this charade, Lovesick moves on to the inevitable: as Charlie reiterates to his best friend that he has given up on romance, the perfect woman appears in the form of Molly (Ali Larter). And because no romantic-comedy cliché can be left untouched, no matter how heinously misogynistic it is, she happens to be a woman whose life needs saving by a man. Charlie seizes the opportunity to become Prince Charming.
