Home Again - Review - Mind on Movies

R: September 8th, 2017 | R: 97 minutes | R: PG-13

The most promising Rom-Com in years has all the ingredients for success. Home Again is lucky enough to be starring Reese Witherspoon, directed by the daughter of the famous Rom-Com director Nancy Meyers, and produced by the legend herself who directed rom-com classics such as The Parent Trap, What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and It’s Complicated. With so much talent, Home Again is almost a guaranteed success. Yet for everything it got right, the movie could not have gone more wrong.

After moving to Los Angeles with her two kids after a rough marital separation, the daughter of a famous filmmaker finds herself dealing with life as a single mother. Celebrating her 40 th birthday, she ends up letting loose with a man thirteen years her junior and his two friends. The three boys moved to LA to pursue their dreams of being a filmmaking trio but have found themselves running out of time without money or a place to stay. Offering up her guest home for the three to stay, the single mother learns how to live with her life as a single mother with the help of her three new guests.

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Despite being a huge fan of the genre, Home Again failed to capture any of the love I have for romantic comedies. In fact, Home Again failed to be romantic or a comedy. A true romance film is supposed to make you fall in love with the film in the same way that its characters fall in love. The characters have to be relatable, fun, charming, and cute. But with nothing more than a passing interest in any of the romantic relationships in the film and without any actual payoff, Home Again does none of those things. Sure, some of the characters go on dates. And sure, some people sleep with each other. But beyond that, there really isn’t anything of any value. None of these characters have more than a mild attraction to each other. There isn’t a triumphant scene where anyone tries to win someone else over. There isn’t any actual woo-ing. There’s some cheap sex and not much else.

Granted, the movie seemed more focused on its drama (if you can call it that) than its romance. But even there, the movie completely missed the mark. It is extremely difficult to feel for any of these characters. The film is wholly superficial and unrelatable. It’s hard to feel sorry for a woman living in a multi-million dollar home without even needing a job as more than anything than just a hobby. And it isn’t even necessarily that a woman in these circumstances cannot have a rough patch, but even the actual “drama” is surface level, easily solved, and overall just lacking. There isn’t any real sense that things aren’t going to work out, and there really isn’t any strife or turmoil. There’s a rocky patch when two guys break out into a fist fight, but that’s about all the drama the film has to offer.

Home Again is filled with awkward, fake laughter whose sole purpose seems to be to cover up the fact that its actual audience has nothing to laugh at. Its characters are shallow and one dimensional. Most of the dialogue is just awkward and inauthentic without an ounce of comedic writing. The script is predictable and formulaic – relying on all of the tropes of the genre but none of the authenticity or excitement.

Home Again takes an amazing actress, an amazing producer, and an amazing genre and combines them into a boring, inauthentic mess. The movie felt long (at only an hour and a half) and meaningless. For a genre known for being unbelievable and superficial, Home Again takes the reputation to a new level. For as much promise as the film had, it sadly squandered it into a forgettable movie.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Johnny (Senior Contributor) was born and raised in San Diego. He's been a fan of films the majority of his life. He enjoys the feeling it invokes and the power it has to take you to another place.
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Starring Reese Witherspoon, Home Again is a modern romantic comedy about love, friendships, and family. Recently separated from her husband (Michael Sheen), Alice Kinney (Witherspoon) moves to her hometown of Los Angeles for a fresh start with her two daughters. While out celebrating her 40th birthday, she stumbles across three aspiring filmmakers who are out of money and have no place. Alice decides to welcome them into her home and let them stay at her guest house temporarily, but the arrangement soon comes to a crashing halt when her ex-husband shows up to win her back.

I wouldn’t say this was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t the best either. I seemed to have missed the whole romantic aspect of this film, as well as the comedy, and even the modern part. Normally with these kind of movies, although you know they’re just a movie, you still expect them to be somewhat realistic and relatable. This movie however wasn’t relatable in anyway. Alice is an unemployed single mother living in a mansion in Los Angeles with no real career plans at the age of 40. She allows three young men she doesn’t know to live in her house with her two young daughters nearby. Within the first 30 minutes of the movie, logical audience members realize this type of plot shouldn’t ever happen unless it ends with a house visit from Child Protective Services. The other characters weren’t very realistic either. The three young filmmakers (Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, and Pico Alexander) were very naïve and cocky in believing they could just move to Los Angeles without any connections or part time jobs. The fact they got lucky enough to meet a woman who allowed them free rent is the reason many older generations hate millennials. The fact they also spent the majority of the film looking for a producer to make their film exactly how they wanted versus just putting in applications at Starbucks and starring in Tide commercials made me resent them.

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Rating: 2 out of 5

Ariel (Contributor) is a Military brat currently living in Texas. When she's not watching the current box office hit, she spends her days reading, cooking, and finding new activities to try.
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