Direction: Jonathan Levine
Country: USA
Jonathan Levine is a promising director whose work has been marked by hits and misses. If their earliest films - 50/50 (2011), The Wackness (2008) and Warm Bodies (2013) - were consistently entertaining, then the most recent - The Night Before (2015), Snatched (2017), and now Long Shot, a romantic comedy moved by political mordancy and starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen, didn’t convince me.
The latter work still throws in some witty lines, but the situations created oscillate between the expected and the pathetic, failing to deliver solid punches in spite of the attempts to look and sound refreshingly subversive.
Levine directed from a screenplay by Dan Sterling, who also conceived the story, and Liz Hannah. The former had worked with Rogen before in The Interview (2014), while the latter got known after teaming up with Josh Singer and write the Oscar-nominated The Post (2017).
Filled with the typical imbroglios this type of comedies likes to focus on, the film illustrates an unlikely romance between Fred Flarsky (Rogen), a brave if big-mouthed political journalist who suddenly gets unemployed, and his former babysitter and childhood crush Charlotte Field (Theron), now the charismatic and sophisticated Secretary of State, who happens to be in the run for the presidency of the United States.
While flirting with some disturbing political truths, the film sometimes mistakes fatuity for freshness. If anything, it works as a showcase for the actors. Rogen is equal to himself and Theron spreads charm throughout. On the screen, they seem to be having a lot of fun together, but the film is definitely not above the ordinary.
