Take Me Home Tonight (2011) spends all night spinning its wheels
A mess can be enjoyable. Something about watching a story competently fail is worthy of consideration. Take Me Home Tonight is my idea of a good mess, blending realistic outcomes to wacky hijinks and some pretty dumb shit.
Meet Matt (Grace). He's a recent MIT graduate living in 1980s California who can not decide what to do with his life so he works at a video store. His sister Wendy (Faris) and best friend Barry (Fogler) also have little going on in their lives but to go to a party of all their high school friends. Will Matt find a purpose to his life as well as the heart of his beautiful crush Tori?
Who gives a shit. Not a question.
Now this might be my 40s talking, but the overall premise of this movie is stupid. This man-child Matt moved across the country to go to an elite school of smarty pants, graduated with a degee, then moved back across the country to pine after his high school crush. Nobody at MIT had any advice for him? He had no life there? No friends? No girlfriend? I went to a state school for English and between taking bourbon shots with my advisor he at least had advice about what to do with my life. Also, CalTech is right fucking there. At least that would explain why he's not moved on with his life.
Topher Grace acts right in his lane here, though. This came after Predators where he played a different nebbishy nerd guy with a twist, Grace slides right back into his That 70s Show persona of "geek guy who will probably end up with the sexiest woman at the party." Nothing special or noteworthy here. Well, there is the moment when he lies to his crush about what he does for a living. That's common rom-com stuff, but then he calls her by the wrong name on purpose. Doesn't matter she does it to him later, that's some stalker negging nonsense that made me hate this guy.
His sister, friend, and their entourage of weirdos are equally well cast. Anna Faris's Wendy has a wonderful "you suck" speech to Matt, and her relationship with Chris Pratt's character has the most realistic moments in the movie. It's clear right off that relationship is doomed, but the journey there broke my heart a little. Then some overacting by Pratt made me lose all that heartbreak for a momentary chuckle.
Everyone else does their job well. Beyond thinking she was Kristen Stewart, Teresa Palmer's Tori made me believe she might be a normal person who would fall for Matt. Dan Fogler plays the wacky best friend with a temper pretty well, delivering the line "those bastards didn't trust me" about the employer who fired him while stealing from them. Other cameos rode the line between delight and what the hell, with spotlights on Demetri Martin and Angie Everhart. The rest popped up with little to no excitement other than "hey, that guy!"
One confusing aspect was Matt's LAPD father played by Michael Biehn. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about the cops here. He starts the movie giving the standard "strict caring father to slacker son" speech. Then as various crimes are committed, he and his partner (Edwin Hodge) show up to cover up everything which feels like a bad look. Near the end, Biehn gives a damn good speech to Matt about trying something, anything. "Take wild shots. It's something just to hear the gun go off." Gun metaphor, but also pretty good advice for a smart kid struggling. Yet the corruption of the LAPD being mentioned is just fucking odd. The man versus the profession here feels in conflict.
I'm not even mentioning The Ball. If this is a real thing, I don't give a shit. Just as stupid as the speech given before it.
So I just went for a couple hundred words to get here: I had fun with this movie. It's meandering and asinine and the characters are too old to be dealing with the problems they have in the time period they are having them, but I had fun watching it. Like watching old people on the swingset, sometimes it's nice to see people have a good time.
It's on streaming and not a total waste of time. Especially if you have a lot of laundry to fold.