Self Reliance
For years now, I’ve tried my best to avoid movie trailers. I go out of my way to avoid them. I add a mandatory 20 minutes to movie times, mute the TV during commercials, and haven’t seen a YouTube ad in two years. I’ve become very dedicated. The movie trailer is a lost art. They either lie to you or show you everything. And this is where my issue with Self Reliance starts.
In a rare avoidance failure, I saw the trailer, and it was fantastic. Action-packed and hilarious. With a premise this strong on paper, and a pretty great cast, this film should have been able to live up to the hype. Tommy (Jake Johnson) becomes a participant in a dark web reality game show. All he has to do is survive 30 days of assassins trying to kill him and he wins a million dollars. That sounds great. The genius behind Nick Miller running from assassins for 87 minutes trying to break himself out of a depressive rut after his girlfriend dumped him; sign me up.
Even better, if he’s close enough to someone, the assassins can’t kill him. But his family doesn’t believe him. He’s fresh out of girlfriends, and he has no one else. So what does he do? He looks for companionship with strangers. First with James/Walter (Biff Wiff), a homeless man he hires. Then with Maddy (Anna Kendrick), who he meets through Craigslist after posting about the game. She tells him she is also playing and they quickly decide to join forces to wait it out together. So far so good, and outside of a few scenes dragging because of the improvisational feel of the dialogue, I’m still in.
But the film gets a little lost after that, struggling with what it wants to be. A thriller? A rom-com? It’s fun watching Tommy fear for his life at first, but we never really see a lot of danger. Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick have chemistry (obvious after 2013’s Drinking Buddies), and it is great watching them together; at multiple points, I wished that was just the movie. What this film probably is at its heart is an abstract look at mental illness. But its unwillingness to commit to its plots makes this a difficult film to review. This film needs more wackiness, more romance, more tension, or just more clarity. The marketing promised me these things, and I bought it. The trailer made Jake Johnson’s directorial debut look like a gift, but the movie sold is not the one that I got.
I give it 2.5 out of 5 stars.
