She’s Out of My League plays out just like every other teen comedy, and while that might not necessarily be a bad thing for its target audience, this general lack of creativity doesn’t bode well for the film standing out amongst the inundated genre.  What also doesn’t help is the excess of duplicated roles – all of the supporting characters provide the same line of limited comedic flair and are virtually indistinguishable from one other.  There are a few surprisingly funny moments spread thinly throughout, but they often come from visual gags and not the abundance of self-esteem related verbal barrages that the movie chooses to focus on.  Many of the characters’ actions are funnier than their words – it’s a shame then that there’s so much dialogue in the film. 

Kirk Kettner (Jay Baruchel) works a seemingly dead end job at an airport terminal, has an embarrassingly crude family, and can’t get back together with the girl he’s hopelessly in love with.  He’s a complete loser – or so he believes. His best friends Jack (Mike Vogel), Devon (Nate Torrence), and Stainer (T.J. Miller) provide little encouragement for his diminishing self-esteem, even when a chance encounter finds him courting the “hard 10” beauty Molly (Alice Eve). As Kirk struggles to keep Molly in his life, and also determine why such a girl so clearly out of his league is even dating him, he must come to terms with his own self worth and learn to follow his heart instead of his despondency.

Constant negative feedback, especially from friends, is enough to crush anyone’s self-esteem. But She’s Out of My League is hopelessly generic, in the same way that most Valentine’s Day movies are geared toward women and have mainly female casts. It’s a tried and true formula, and with each new entry into the teen sex comedy genre, more ground is covered, more taboos smashed and fewer raunchy gags left undone. Perhaps the biggest problem with this particular experiment is that new territories are left unexplored. It has an “R” rating, but nothing about it is boundary-pushing. It’s so safely inside the limits of what other comparable films have done before that with some minor trimming, it could easily have been PG-13.

Glamorous blonde Alice Eve gets a top-to-bottom slow-motion entrance, Kirk is a loser in the sense that his confidence is low, his prospects are limited and his relationships are drenched in immaturity, and Molly’s ex is a macho, chiseled jet pilot. The supporting characters are so tired and common that watching them feels like a montage of every other teen sex comedy in the last few years. One scene early on has a hint of the pure, enthralling fantasy of movies like Weird Science, where feeling good about the lead character is genuinely enjoyable and the sexy leading lady appears involved for the benefit of Kirk’s image to his peers. It momentarily elevates the characters into a different, more entertaining world, although the surrounding sequences should have been more earthbound. The same scene also plays up one of the film’s largest faults: every single supporting character relies on the same style of humor, which relies on foul-mouthed, loud, over-the-top theatrics. Kirk and Molly are in a league of their own considering how incredibly similar every other cast member acts.

- The Massie Twins

 

 

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