Director: Will Gluck
Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.
Did I Like It: She might just be a little bit beyond it now—especially as she’s already done her near-obligatory superhero film tour of duty with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)—but Emma Stone would have made a great Barbara Gordon. Ah, well. Given the once and future Batgirl’s struggles to find her way to the big screen, it was never meant to be. I promised myself this review would devote fewer than 100 words to Barbara Gordon, and I am in imminent danger of breaking that limit.
That is all to say that had this film only had Stone’s up-until-that-point-undiscovered star power to fuel it. More than enough teen movies and romantic comedies are content to hinge their success or failure on chemistry or star power, and plenty of them get the job done well enough. Thankfully, there’s a big vibe of being delightfully smarter than everyone else in the room* throughout the film. Even reaching for such a quality immediately puts this film ahead of the average film in either genre. Far more valuably, though to the quest of being a memorable comedy, is an insistent vein of absurdism throughout. Some might claim the non sequitur is a weaker form of humor, but those people are wrong, and even they are going to enjoy the film. That’s the real strength: there’s something here for everyone, and no one has to feel like they’re slumming it.
*In case you were wondering, that’s where the big Barbara Gordon energy comes into the proceedings for me. It should for you, too. I *really* shouldn’t have dived right into the writing of this review right after reading a lot of Batgirl movie news.