Trainwreck (2015)

** ½ out of ****

I have to admit that walking into “Trainwreck” I wasn't sure what to expect. I generally get a kick out of shock comedy, but shock comedians run very hot and cold. Amy Schumer is someone who when she is funny is really, really funny, but when she isn't she's painful to watch. The trailers looked hilarious but that doesn't always give the most accurate read....

Schumer plays Amy Townsend, a commitment-fearing woman who works at a men's magazine. [Sidebar – her boss is the female version of an old boss of mine, a work-Nazi who, once you are there for a while, you wish a gruesome death upon every single day.] And Amy is, let's be honest, a slut. She uses as many men as possible for sex, doesn't want any actual intimacy, and is completely superficial.  You know.... she's like most guys.

She is given an assignment to write an article about sports doctor Aaron Connors (Bill Hader) that is revolutionizing knee implants for athletes, and who is working with some of the biggest names in sports. His running off the names of a few of his clients at a party gave me my biggest laugh of the film. This theme introduces a running gag in the film, that his client and closest friend Lebron James (playing himself) is actually a very sensitive guy. Believe me, this gag is wildly overused and is tired after the first two iterations.... but it goes on and on and on.

So (to sum up the plot in one further sentence) Amy falls for the doctor, they have a great time together, they argue and break up despite loving each other and eventually get back together. That's a spoiler, but anyone that doesn't see it coming isn't intelligent enough to read, so I am sure I didn't give anything away.... But the humour in the film has to do with Amy's attitudes about relationships; she just doesn't know how to have one. This “she's the guy and Hader's the girl in the relationship” is the one note that the film is based around, and it doesn't deviate from that note. But it's a rom-com, so I wasn't expecting anything deep.

What it all came down to was, “Is it funny?” And there's no denying it is. Hader is a talented guy but he is pretty subdued here to let Schumer go wild. She has a lot of funny lines with a tone that is very familiar from her TV show, and uses some pretty intelligent references in some of them that I'm sure many in the audience wouldn't have understood. Colin Quinn, as Schumer's always belligerent father, is absolutely hysterical as an old-timer in a nursing home - the film could have used much more of him.

“Trainwreck” is a being called “a different kind of rom-com” but really it isn't. The humour is simply more off-colour than most, and the man/woman roles have been reversed (this is hardly the first time THAT has happened in a movie). Good for quite a few laughs consistently throughout, and though it hits a real slow patch in the last half hour it's definitely worth seeing. The laughs you get will be hard and loud, and make up for any slow parts of the film.