Trainwreck (2015) ***/*****

There aren’t many things that a comedy has to do in order to be considered a success. If it’s consistently funny throughout its run time and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, then pretty much it did what it needed to do. No big whoop. Trainwreck, the new romantic comedy from writer/star Amy Schumer and director Judd Apatow manages to accomplish both, which is kind of a miracle given how long and shaggy Apatow’s last few movies have gotten, but somehow it still doesn’t quite accomplish everything it needs to in order to be considered a complete success. It’s a success with an asterisk next to the word.

Before we get into the good and bad of the film, let’s talk a little bit about the story. Schumer stars as a girl named Amy, which I guess is supposed to make us believe that the role she’s written for herself is close to her heart and fairly confessional. Her character writes for a trashy men’s magazine during the day and spends her nights binge drinking and having one-night stands, which might have been cute when she was in her twenties, but is starting to look pretty depressing now that she’s getting older. All of that changes when she is assigned to write a story about a successful new sports surgeon (Bill Hader) though, because not only is there a spark between them, but he also ends up being the sort of stable, legit guy who she never goes for. Can a woman who’s lived her whole life as the titular train wreck actually settle down and have a real relationship, or have the life patterns she’s established for herself doomed her to a fate of self-sabotage?

The reason Trainwreck doesn’t live up to its potential isn’t that it’s not a funny movie — Schumer wrote a hilarious script and Apatow put together a hilarious cast to bring it to life — it’s that it fails to answer that question in any sort of interesting way. Through her years of stand-up and her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, Schumer has developed a reputation for creating edgy, boundary-pushing humor, and that’s not just because she’s unafraid to get raunchy or to say something offensive, it’s because she’s also willing to take hot-button social issues head on in order to point out hypocrisies in our society. She’s like some kind of world-changing social activist, except she makes jokes about vaginas instead of organizing marches and stuff.

For most of Trainwreck’s run time you get what you’d expect from Schumer. The jokes are crass and frank and cleverly worded. But once it comes time for her to actually develop her character and figure out what it looks like when a woman who’s been serially unattached her whole life finally goes after a meaningful relationship, the movie seems to panic and quickly goes into default romantic comedy mode. The question of whether a woman like this really even needs a relationship in order to be whole and not “broken” never gets explored. Instead, you get the typical break-between-the-protagonists, montage-of-loneliness, big-public-act-of-romance story structure that every lame rom-com that starred people like J-Lo or Katherine Heigl has ever adhered to. It gets so bad that the third act has a few shots in it that feel like parodies of dumb rom-coms rather than scenes from a real movie, but there’s no satire going on here. Trainwreck is really serving you lukewarm leftovers, and it’s doing so with a straight face. Schumer’s comedy has been so much smarter and so much more interesting than this in the past that it can’t help but feel like a disappointment.

That’s not to say that the film isn’t worth watching though, because it only gets lame in its last third. The first two thirds are really entertaining and consistently laugh out loud funny. The phrase “laugh a minute” gets thrown around a lot, but yeah, the first two acts of this movie actually probably average a big laugh a minute. The chuckles don’t just come from comedic rocks like Schumer and Hader either. NBA star Lebron James and WWE star John Cena get fairly large roles here and they both end up being so good that they’re likely going to surprise a lot of people. Not only are they game to look ridiculous, but they also both show a knack for the rhythm and timing necessary to properly deliver a joke. If either has bigger Hollywood aspirations, their work here is likely going to help them out quite a bit on that front. Tilda Swinton and Brie Larson — who are both probably considered to be more dramatic actresses than comedic — both have substantial roles and both are great also. Swinton plays the decency-free editor of the men’s magazine Schumer works for and has a great time chewing scenery, while Larson plays Schumer’s younger sister and helps out a great deal lending the story’s dramatic elements some heft. Those ladies can do anything.

While it’s definitely got third act problems and it occasionally includes a joke or two that doesn’t land (a reoccurring movie-within-a-movie starring Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei failed to earn any laughs and should have been cut), Trainwreck is nonetheless a promising effort from a first-time feature writer, and Schumer’s work as the lead is strong enough — not only comedically, but also in the more dramatic moments — that she’s proved that she can be a big movie star somewhere down the road. It may just take working with a script that has a little bit more bite to it for her big screen career to really pop. As far as Apatow goes, it felt fresh to see him direct a movie using actors who weren’t a part of his regular crew of players. For a while there it started to feel like he was repeating himself as a filmmaker. If, for his next project, he’s able to find a script that isn’t about an adult in an arrested state of adolescence finally maturing, things could get even fresher. His filmmaking career having a second act just as vital as its first isn’t at all inconceivable, and would be really satisfying to watch unfold.