Spurned lovers plot nutty revenge in risky, frisky 'I Want You Back'
“I Want You Back” - ★ ★ ★
Just when we need a snappy, funny relationship movie that playfully stretches the boundaries of traditional rom-coms, Amazon Prime Video gives us “I Want You Back,” a shrewdly observed study of thirtysomethings rebounding from the soul-wrenching experience called “being dumped.”
When weepy Peter (Charlie Day) meets sobbing Emma (Jenny Slate), it's in the stairwell of the Atlanta building where they work. These emotional two form an instant bond: Both have just been dumped by their significant others, who have moved on to new romantic partners with alarming alacrity.
So, Peter and Emma concoct a desperate plan to get their exes back by attempting to sabotage those new relationships.
The alluring Emma vows to seduce middle-school music teacher Logan (Manny Jacinto), now with Peter's ex, Anne (Gina Rodriguez). The admittedly nonalluring Peter says he'll settle for befriending Emma's ex, physical trainer Noah (Scott Eastwood), and slowly turning him against Anne.
“I Want You Back” avoids the usual easy villains and most of the tired conventions in pedestrian rom-coms. It focuses on the begrudgingly slow maturation of two unhappy, wounded souls defiantly struggling to remain exactly in life where they've been for far too long.
This movie comes from the word processors of producers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, the sharp and insightful writing team behind the film “Love, Simon” and the television series “This is Us” and “How I Met Your Father.”
Their relationship-savvy screenplay - combined with Jonathan Schwartz's crackerjack eye for crisp, innovative editing - imbues “I Want You Back” with refreshing newness and bawdy bravado.
Take the sequence in which Peter and Noah go to a nightclub, meet three adventuresome women, then follow them back to an upscale house for some hallucinogenic drugs and high dives off a balcony into a small hot tub.
Both Day and Slate started out in comedy - she as a stand-up comic and “Saturday Night Live” regular, he as a producer, writer and star of “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia” - and have developed into impressively versatile performers, especially Slate.
Slate shines here during a subplot in which Emma befriends and nurtures a hurting, troubled student (Luke David Blumm) on the set of Logan's run of his ambitious middle school musical presentation of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Despite the selfish and embarrassing immaturity of their characters here, Slate and Day still earn our hearts, mostly because of the inherent good residing within theirs. (Peter helps an extremely old woman across the street, prompting Emma to suggest that if he wants to ask her out, “You better hurry.”)
“I Want You Back” feels risky and frisky, full of living and forgiving, as it loads up on awkward, uncomfortable sequences alongside instances of disarming romance, sweetness and laughs.
Besides, how many movies have a hilarious middle school rendition of “Suddenly Seymour” as its comic highlight?
Starring: Charlie Day, Jenny Slate, Gina Rodriguez, Manny Jacinto, Scott Eastwood
Directed by: Jason Orley
Other: An Amazon Prime Video release. On Amazon Prime. Rated R for language, sexual situations. 111 minutes