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Ricky Gervais is a funny guy and he is allowed to show off his humor and dry wit in a wonderfully hilarious way throughout most of this movie. It starts off with him in his office. As Bertram Pincus, he is a dentist and a woman is in his chair gabbing non-stop about her family life. Gervais' character could care less about her life. Throughout the first 45 minutes or so of the movie we learn that Bertram is not only a loner but a self-centered jerk. Not a rude, screaming name-calling jerk but a guy who speaks his mind and just isn't afraid of hurting peoples feelings. This makes him seem more real and so the humor is much more realistic and not over the top like so many movies seem to be these days. For example, in one early scene a fellow dentist in his office is inviting him to cake to celebrate the birth of his child. Most people would say, "great, be right there" and that would be it. In other movies, the jerk would say something like "Why do I care about your damn baby?" Instead, Bertram looks at him for a few seconds with a slightly annoyed look on his face and asks "Anything else?" It's dry biting wit like that which kept me laughing out loud through the first half of the movie. Another scene with him in the hospital has a nurse asking him general questions that everybody has had to answer when checking into a hospital such as what is your date of birth and what's your address. In other movies he might make up some silly answers to these questions but true to his character he just refuses to answer these "irrelevant" questions and the back and forth that goes on with him and nurse had me in stitches. For me though, once the movie gets into the second half with Bertram helping out Kinnear's character, who is a ghost after dying early in the movie, the movie starts to feel like every other romantic comedy with cliché misunderstandings and the "I saw that coming from a mile away" ending that mostly blows it for me. The biting and dry humor is there throughout the movie but it becomes less frequent as the ending draws near. So, as much as I enjoyed the first half, as usual, once the romantic part of the comedy comes into focus, the comedy becomes more cliché and less realistic. Even my friend who is a HUGE romcom fanatic was rolling her eyes and looking bored through most of the second half. The first half is funny and fresh with laughs coming at a rapid pace, while the second half slows down to a crawl at times and drags on with plot devices borrowed from hundreds of other romantic comedies. Too bad. Just like Gervais' character, this movie started out to be different and real but in the second half it decided to conform to every other movie of it's type.
score 6/10
dalt99 17 September 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1947420/ |
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2-12-2019 08:59:29
