Review: Isn't It Romantic

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Even when it veers toward becoming the type of film that is lampooning, "Isn't It Romantic" is a mostly charming and often funny, thanks to Rebel Wilson, send-up of Hollywood romantic comedies. The film follows the same plotline as that of the 1991 comedy "Delirious," in which a screenwriter for a soap opera played by John Candy gets into an accident and wakes up as a character in the soap opera.

In this picture, Wilson plays Natalie, a young woman who is disenchanted with romance and, as we see during an amusing early sequence set in Australia, not a fan of romantic comedies after her mother tells her that the films are primarily made up of lies that give young women unrealistic expectations.

Natalie works at a small architecture firm in Manhattan and lives in a shabby apartment in Queens. At work, a co-worker named Josh (Adam Devine), whom she keeps in the "friend zone," clearly has a crush on her, and her best friend and secretary, Whitney (Betty Gilpin), repeatedly attempts and fails to convince her that mushy screen romances could be the fodder of Natalie's life if she only opened up a bit.

After escaping a mugging in the subway, Natalie bangs her head and wakes up in, you guessed it, a romantic comedy, complete with a flamboyantly gay BFF neighbor, Donny (Brandon Scott Jones, who nabs many of the movie's best zingers), an apartment that anyone making less than $1 million per year could not afford, a ridiculously full shoe closet, a higher profile position in her company, a hot millionaire (Liam Hemsworth) interested in her, voice over narration that occasionally follows her around, 1980s and 1990s tunes ("Kiss Me" and "No More I Love Yous," for example) randomly playing in the background and a penchant for finding herself in the middle of random musical and dance numbers.

The film's central gag - Natalie being stuck in a rom com - is milked for all its worth and, truth be told, it's pretty funny overall. It helps that Wilson's cynical Natalie provides a good foil for the trappings of the genre. I had a good laugh when Natalie blows off a montage of trying on clothes to the tune of Black Box's "Everybody, Everybody," much to the dismay of Donny.

While the picture parodies a number of popular rom coms - and even lifts lines from the likes of "When Harry Met Sally" and "Jerry Maguire" - it ultimately becomes a riff on the Julia Roberts film "My Best Friend's Wedding," with Natalie realizing that Hemsworth's slightly controlling looker doesn't hold a candle to Josh, her best friend who actually deeply cares for her and is about to get married to a "yoga ambassador" played by Priyanka Chopra. And much to Natalie's chagrin, the film culminates with a slow motion run to a wedding chapel to break up a ceremony.

While a few scenes in "Isn't It Romantic" could have been left on the cutting room floor - did we really need not one, but two musical numbers? - it's a mostly breezy rom com satire. Naturally, it ends up adopting the cliches that it parodies, which often ends up being the curse of a movie of this sort. Regardless, "Isn't It Romantic" is pretty fun.