Main cast: Luke Bracey (Brendan Ehrlick), Dustin Milligan (Cory), Emily Meade (Gabbi), Angela Sarafyan (Heather), Scott Bakula (Mr Ehrlick), and Geena Davis (Mrs Ehrlick)
Director: Max Landis
Once a while Hollywood decides to fall in love with some preppy young guy with the right pedigree, and Max Landis is currently one of those “it” lads. He writes screenplays, authors comic books, directs Ariana Grande‘s music video, and is as mainstream as you can be while clinging on to some faux-indie street cred. Actually, none of his works so far stand out as great, and in fact, most of them are clunkers, but Me Him Her, his directorial debut, may just be the clunkiest clunk that ever clunked him in his clunk. And he has no one else to blame, considering that he wrote the script too.
Brendan Ehrlick, a child actor, is making a somewhat decent transition to being an adult actor, thanks to his role in a popular, very macho-centric TV series about cops and all. However, he has just been kissed by a nice guy, and he finally has to accept that he’s gay. He plans to call his best friend, Cory (who claims to be straight) over to help him as he plans his coming out, first to his parents and later to the rest of the world. Cory, however, spends more time pining after Gabbi, a lesbian who has a drunken shag with him after she was dumped by her model girlfriend.
I suppose if you want to get offended, it is easy to do so here as we have a straight guy coming down to save a lesbian from the tatters of her ruined love life and even getting her to enjoy awesome straight sex. But the problem with this script is that it is – or rather, Mr Landis is – apparently ignorant or uncaring of whatever sensitivities, real or imagined, that it is trampling on. It soon becomes apparent that this isn’t Brendan’s story – he’s just a B-plot here, a device to get Cory to come to LA and become the king of the town (at least in Mr Landis’s mind). The end result is a charmless movie so absorbed in deifying Cory that it is blind to just how much of an obnoxious twat that character is.
Cory thinks he knows everything about the world. There is no nuance – Brendan must come out, because it is the only right thing to do in Cory’s mind, even if it means damaging Brendan’s chances at having a bigger career, so Cory pushes, coerces, and even kidnaps Brendan into doing what he thinks is best for that man. That’s not so bad… if Cory doesn’t abandon Brendan once he has set things in motion to make Brendan’s life difficult because he is too busy turning lesbians to the joys of his awesome pee-pee. And yet, the movie knights Cory, making him front and center to such a degree that I can only wonder whether he’s an avatar of Mr Landis. Is there some nice lesbian girl that he is infatuated with but can’t have? Maybe this movie is his love tribute to himself – if he can’t have her, et cetera, that kind of thing.
The acting is pretty underwhelming from the main younger cast. Emily Meade just has to look sullen or teary-eyed, while the two men have to shout out most of the lines, apparently because loud and funny is one and the same. Scott Bakula and Geena Davis have rather small roles here, so they get to do their thing without being crippled by the script demanding thankless things from them. The comedic timing is frequently off in this movie, and what is supposed to be funny often comes off as loud, obnoxious, and whiny. I’m not sure what this movie is all about, other than a painful too-long effort by Mr Landis to show the world that he can save gay men from themselves and get lesbians to love his almighty peen. At any rate, I’m not impressed.
