How To Be Single

HOW TO BE SINGLE

Director : Christian Ditter
Year : 2016
Genre : Comedy
Rating : **

Following in the high-heeled footsteps of recent female-led, financially successful comedies such as 'Bridesmaids', 'The Heat' and 'Trainwreck', Christian Ditter's proudly anti-romcom 'How To Be Single' combines the bawdy overtones of the 'Sex & The City' TV series with the cloying mawkishness of the countless 'Love Actually' knockoffs to little effect. Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson star as coworkers and BFF's Alice and Robin who embark on a cavalcade of sexual escapades and inappropriate behaviour while extolling the virtues of being alone in a love-filled world. Into the mix we also have a number of other love-themed scenarios including an annoyingly pushy and narratively pointless young woman (Alison Brie) who, with the use of algorithms, patrols the internet searching for her prince charming while Leslie Mann co-stars as Alice's sister Meg, a single, child-fearing obstetrician who spontaneously decides to undergo IVF treatment after spending time with an impossibly adorable baby. 

Written by Marc Silverstein, Abby Kohn and Dana Fox, the crass screenplay obviously views itself as a flag-waving advocation of the feminist movement - a testament to those who are not afraid to be themselves and defiantly laugh in the face of our increasingly homogenous, romance obsessed society. But while it contains a few scattershot moments of identifiably awkward humour, for the most part, 'How To Be Single' disappoints in both emotional and, most vitally, comedic terms. Many of the lazy proto-'Trainwreck' sexual gags (mostly delivered by Wilson's proudly promiscuous Robin) really leave a lot to be desired while the films overly saccharine tone fails to tug on the heartstrings thanks to a glaring lack of investability in any of the one-dimensional characters - most notable in the tonally disparate IVF subplot which ends up becoming the movies main source for nauseating sentimentality. 

Its a shame because the performances from the cast aren't too bad at all with both 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' starlet Dakota Johnson and 'Knocked Up's' Leslie Mann doing pretty good jobs with their barely developed roles. Even 'Pitch Perfect's Rebel Wilson, who I am not at all a fan of, manages to get a guilty chuckle every now and then - even if her constant profanities and wince-inducing vulgaraties do wear thin pretty quickly. But saddled with weak dialogue and direction that is, at best, pedestrian, they cannot help but look remarkably average in a movie that attempts to be edgy, raunchy and subversive but ultimately falls into the shadows of its vastly superior and much funnier counterparts.