Get Me to the Smirks on Time

By Anthony Quinn

FILM OF THE WEEK

27 Dresses (12A)

Anne Fletcher (111 mins) **

STARRING Katherine Heigl, Edward Burns, James Marsden

Drillbit Taylor (12A)

Steven Brill (102 mins) ***

STARRING Owen Wilson, Troy Gentile, Nate Hartley

The romantic comedy 27 Dresses, about a woman who’s always been the bridesmaid, is a little like one of those weddings where the food is inedible, the wine is served in thimblefuls, the music is atrocious and the speeches are never-ending – but you still have quite a good time. That’s because the principal players, Katherine Heigl and James Marsden, not only make the most of a mediocre script, but they also manage to project characters who are likeable, if not quite believable, human beings. These days, even that little can be enough to help you through a couple of hours.

Timed to catch the rash of spring weddings, it concerns the travails of Jane (Heigl), a Manhattan singleton who’s played bridesmaid 27 times and still has the dresses to prove it. She’s a paragon of selflessness whose secret crush on her boss (Edward Burns, miscast) is abruptly sabotaged when her spoilt younger sister, Tess (Malin Akerman), breezes in to town and sweeps the man off his feet. Weeks later, sis and boss announce their engagement, and poor old Jane will be required not only to do bridesmaid duty (again), but to organise the whole wedding.

Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who made a fine job of turning The Devil Wears Prada into a thin-lipped bitchfest, has misjudged things here. That Heigl, gorgeous by any standard, should be anyone’s doormat is stretching credulity; that she also tolerates a sister who’s a bubble-headed monster of egomania snaps it altogether. Every time Akerman appears you wonder why someone hasn’t already tried to throttle her – she’s that horrible.

Fortunately, the prickly relationship that develops between Jane and Kevin (James Marsden), a journalist stuck in “the taffeta ghetto” of the wedding columns, has a spark and sexiness uncommon in the genre. Heigl is a fabulous comedienne, her fluid switches of expression being one of the joys of Knocked Up, and she handles the movie’s slapstick with aplomb. Watching her warm up to Marsden’s pleasantly cynical scribe proves more than tolerable, and her best friend (Judy Greer), sniping away on the sidelines, also gives the mood a lift.

Elsewhere, the film shows itself unafraid of cliche, including a bar scene when they start singing “Benny and The Jets”, and the background clientele enthusiastically join in, and the reliance on wacky montage is regrettable. Those 27 weddings won’t stand up to any investigation, either. Would Jane really know that many couples with such a fondness for “themed” nuptials, or such bad taste in executing them?

This clinches its two-star rating almost entirely on the strength of Heigl’s comic chops, though I do wonder about her choice of roles. Having admitted that she thought Knocked Up a bit sexist, Heigl perhaps believed that a movie conceived by a female screenwriter and a female director (Anne Fletcher) would ring some changes. And what 27 Dresses says is this: a girl can only attain happiness and fulfilment by getting hitched. I’m not sure that message is a fist-clenching triumph for the feminist cause.

Seth Rogen, Heigl’s co-star in Knocked Up, keeps writing screen versions of himself, and they’re getting younger by the picture. In Superbad, Jonah Hill played a tubby, curly-haired teen about to start college. Now, in Drillbit Taylor, Troy Gentile plays a tubby, curly-haired adolescent about to start high school. We must presume that the next Rogen screenplay will feature a tubby, curly-haired five-year-old about to start infant school. Soon we’ll be able to view his whole career on a wall chart of diminishing Rogens, like a picture of evolution in reverse.

Like the others, Drillbit Taylor revolves around a trio of friends. Whereas in Superbad they’re trying to get laid, here they’re trying to avoid getting bullied, a plan that goes awry on the very first day when beanpole Wade (Nate Hartley) and Ryan (Troy Gentile) turn up wearing exactly the same shirt. Aargh! Soon enough, their gaffe attracts the chief bully (Alex Frost), who bundles them up in one shirt and calls them “the Siamese queers”. Even the headmaster chuckles at that. The boys, battened on by a hobbitty loner named Emmit (David Dorfman) – “He’s like a stray cat; once you feed him he’ll never go away” – decide that the best way to survive school is to hire a bodyguard.

Of all their applicants, the only one they can afford is Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson), who claims to have been trained in special- ops before being discharged from the army for “unauthorised heroism”. He holds out his arm and crooks his elbow. “Know what this is?” he asks the boys. “It’s a wing – and you’re under it.” They hire him immediately, though what they don’t know is that he actually deserted the army and now lives as a dumpster-haunting vagrant. The silliness of the conceit is complicated by its juvenile fantasy of protection. As the boys veer between their everyday ordeal and the possibility that their “bodyguard” might save them, one can’t help wonder how closely Rogen has based their terror of bullying on his own experiences – it’s an oddly fearful kind of comedy for an adult to write. He is fast becoming the laureate of adolescent misfits.

A slide into mawkishness is threatened but mainly avoided by the vigour of the young cast. The boys play off one another like a junior version of The Three Stooges, and their interaction with Wilson is amusingly done. The latter barely strays from type as the sleepy-eyed charmer who’s not all he seems. I’m not quite sure how he manages to pass himself off as a substitute teacher at the high school, still less how he so quickly secures the affections of Leslie Mann’s English teacher – he introduces himself as “Dr Illbit” – but you can’t help enjoying his stumblebum improvisation and the lies that mount up around him. When the boys finally twig that he’s not a trained bodyguard, one of them asks him if his name really is Drillbit. No, he admits with a sigh, it’s actually… “Alamo” Taylor.

(c) 2008 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.