The Incredible Jessica James Review
Jessica Williams doesn’t miss her chance for ascension, but otherwise this is an uninspired rom-com
The Incredible Jessica James is unashamedly a star vehicle for its lead, Jessica Williams, and in this regard it succeeds. Williams is confident, watchable and her star is definitely on the rise. If the surrounding film wasn’t so by the numbers and remarkably unfunny, The Incredible Jessica James might have even been good. Williams’ strength keeps the film from disaster but this is nothing more than a mediocre rom-com.
When we first meet Jessica, she seems completely insufferable. She is on a date with a guy she met on Tinder and has purposefully taken him to her ex’s favourite bar in the hope he’ll see them together and get jealous. I suspect writer/director Jim Strouse was going for strong and funny-snarky when he wrote a scene in which Jessica shoots down her date’s offer for a drink and tells him that she’d “rather have her period for a thousand years than continue this portion of the conversation” but she just comes off as mean and full of herself. Once you get past the horrible opening, things look up a bit, but not much. A lively credits sequence sees Jessica dancing around her apartment building and, eventually, up to the roof. Williams oozes energy from this point on, but I felt a strong disconnect between how easily I warmed to Williams, the actress, and how difficult it was to like James, the character. Badly dancing on the roof of her building with a wide smile makes Williams easily likeable, but throwing a fellow resident’s freshly cleaned laundry all over the floor makes James seem a bit off. As the film progresses, Williams does a good job of showing Jessica’s insecurities beneath her confident facade, which does alleviate some of the more questionable actions the character makes. A struggling playwright who’s afraid she’ll never get anywhere, Jessica James is all bravado. “Everyone likes me. I’m dope,” she tells Chris O’Dowd’s Boone, but it’s clear she fears the opposite is true. Outside of a magnetic, if occasionally unlikeable, central character, though, The Incredible Jessica James offers very little else. The story is standard rom-com fare: James is set up on a date through a friend (Noël Wells) with a guy she met on a work course. He turns out to be Boone (Chris O’Dowd) and he and Jessica have an awkward, but not entirely unsuccessful first date. She goes with him, but neither is expecting much as they are both carrying so much baggage. Jessica has just split up with her boyfriend of two years (a hugely underused Lakeith Stanfield) and Boone is only months out of a divorce.
From here, the film plays out in a predictable fashion, but in this genre that’s not really a bad thing. Rom-coms are predictable by their nature and plot isn’t exactly their strength. A good rom-com finds its strength in its characters and it’s here where Jessica James falls down. Outside of James herself, there isn’t a single character with any depth. O’Dowd gets a few laughs but it feels like that’s more down to the actor’s wonderful comic delivery than anything in the script. And other than those few laughs plus a few more from Jessica (again, Williams is more to thank here than Strouse), the com doesn’t fare much better than the rom. Jessica Williams is a proven talent from her work on The Daily Show and her comedy podcast 2 Dope Queens (which she co-hosts with Phoebe Robinson) but her feature leading role debut cements her as a premiere comedy performer and her career is only set to get bigger from here. It’s just a shame her breakout couldn’t come in the form of something more wholly satisfying.
