There is an old saying that goes if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. It’s a saying that will get quite a workout over the course of SHE’S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, an amiable romantic comedy that pits common sense against romantic reverie while also examining the perils of being a moodle and the implications of the dao of love.
The moodle, a cross between a man and a poodle, is Kirk (Jay Baruchel), a sweet security agent at the Pittsburgh airport. He’s a young man with middling ambitions career-wise, and middling expectations romance-wise. The dao is the rating system worked out by his lifelong pal, Stainer (T.J. Miller), the one that assigns numbers to potential lovers, and assigns rules about matching them up. Kirk, by common consent, including his, is a five. A hard five. The best he can do, per the dao, is a seven, the which was his ex, Marnie (Lindsay Sloane), the woman who dumped him, but not his family, who favor her company, and that of her new boyfriend, over Kirk’s.
Still smarting from his latest attempt to win Marnie back, the attempt everyone advised him against, he is surprised, and not a little suspicious, when a hard ten actively woos him. She’s Molly (Alice Eve), blonde, successful, and obviously eager to do more than just thank Kirk for finding her cell phone. Much more.
What could easily have been a mindless and tasteless romp aspires to something a bit more and succeeds. Thanks in no small way to Baruchel’s winning performance. He takes flying pucks to the body during a round of basement hockey like a pratfall pro, and drives the junker car that is emblematic of his dao status with the requisite embarrassment and acceptance that is funny and poignant at the same time. He is resolutely a five, awkward and with a bad haircut and worse sartorial choices, but he is also resolutely a good guy with smarts and a sly way with words once he’s calmed down. Standing next to Molly’s Greek god of an ex (Geoff Stults), it seems like a slam dunk of rejection until each of them starts to speak, and that’s when the glory that was Greece crumbles precipitously in a haze of conceit and condescension. Molly herself, who has her own all too human hidden motives for pouncing on Kirk, is picture perfect as well, but, thanks to Eve’s subtly self-deprecating performance, with an engaging warmth and her own sly sense of humor that perfectly meshes with Kirk’s. When she meets Kirk’s family, including Marnie and her new boyfriend, she accepts the way they are dazzled by her, and uses it to boost Kirk’s ego while every so gently but firmly trampling theirs. Whether it makes a dent in Kirk’s boorish brother (Kyle Bornheimer) the one who has used him for all sorts of target practice over the years, is debatable, but hardly relevant.
As for the necessary exposition to externalize Kirk’s exquisite agonizing over why exactly a ten hot for him, that’s handled nicely by his pals, including Devon (Nate Torrence), a cherubic romantic who seems to think he’s living in a Disney animated musical, and makes you wish we all were. Molly has her own expository device in the person of best friend and employee Patty (Khrysten Ritter), who plays unpleasant with an scary edge that makes it hurt so good.
SHE’S OUT OF MY LEAGUE skirts the gummy shoals of the profane. There are a few jokes that do not bear describing, though a sequence that has Devon shaving Kirk’s privates so that Molly will think that he is more sexually experienced than is the case, is handled with an innocence that is as adorable as it is unexpected, just like the film itself. Unlike several higher profile attempts at romantic comedy drama, this little flick actually achieves what they missed, it’s heartwarming, laugh-out-loud funny, and actually sort of romantic in a puckishly real world way.
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