Amy Schumer, our current favorite potty-mouthed comedienne, is striking while the iron is hot with “Trainwreck,” a rambunctious, hard-R-rated romantic comedy that showcases her sweetly poisonous manner. Schumer wrote the screenplay, which is rambling and overlong, and Judd Apatow directed it, which explains why it didn’t get tightened up.
Here’s the portion of the Movie B.S. with Bayer and Snider podcast where we reviewed “Trainwreck.”
Schumer plays Amy, a 30-something writer at a men’s magazine whose life is a series of commitment-free one-night stands, drinking, and weed-smoking — in other words, the sort of movie lifestyle normally reserved for male characters. (The film doesn’t really do anything with this gender reversal, by the way.) It befalls a sports doctor (Bill Hader) she’s profiling for a story to tame her wild ways and help her grow up.
Schumer stays disappointingly close to the rom-com formula, with its contrived complications, and the film is burdened by unnecessary cameos and meandering tangents (e.g. everything with her dad, played by Colin Quinn). But the laughs outnumber the groans by a wide margin, thanks to Schumer and Hader’s virtuosity and funny supporting performances by such unlikely suspects as John Cena, LeBron James, and Tilda Swinton. Schumer is a fresh, bold new voice in comedy, and while this film doesn’t fully reflect that, it’s a reasonably mirthful foundation to build on.
B- (2 hrs., 5 min.; )
