Director: David Wain
Cast: Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Cobie Smulders, Christopher Meloni
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m strangely tempted to watch it whenever it shows up on a streaming service I’ve already paid for. Several years ago, it was Netflix, and when it came up on HBO, that temptation came again.
Did I Like It: On my second viewing of Wet Hot American Summer (2001) I was struck by a disheartening realization: after viewing the Netflix spinoff shows, I realized I liked those shows better than the movie. I bring this up here because I’m disappointed to report that I liked this film far less the second time around. It’s partially because those shows have the time to turn the absurdism up to the maximum without any need to ape the format of previous films.
So it is that They Came Together doesn’t work as well this time. Too much time is spent making sure we all know that we’re going through tropes that we’ve all seen. It borders on that type of humor that has been done to death in Cinema Sins youtube videos and the films of Friedberg and Seltzer, wherein pointing out something that another film does is the same thing as a joke. I get that the notion that “New York is another character in the film” is a hoary cliché, but there is a point in the life of dismantling a cliché that the dismantling itself becomes cliché.
Thankfully, one has no problem watching Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler do anything, so the time of disappointment goes by rather pleasantly, and the proceedings do reach for that sublimely ridiculous, even if it doesn’t do so as often as I might hope. The dead-eyed reactions of Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper went along with my own reactions, and the ultimate realization that Rudd and Poehler’s characters should never be together adds some semblance of sanity, even if things would have worked better if logic and reason had been abandoned altogether.