3 out of 5
I tend to really enjoy Judd Apatow's approach to comedy. His blending of improvisational moments and scripted stories tends to pay off wonderfully, and I've always enjoyed the way he's brought out the comedy in dramatic moments and vice versa. And I wish I could say the same about This is 40. But where other Apatow films have always managed to keep momentum even during their derails into improvisation, This is 40 feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of brief moments that never quite add up in the way you wish they would. There's a great heart here, as you might expect from Apatow, and the main thrust of the story - the way love changes as you get older, have children, and recalibrate your relationship - is something I really loved and could identify with. But every time I started to get into the film, it would jump off in a different direction, and the whole thing feels ungainly, uncontrolled, and frustratingly unstructured in any meaningful way. Rudd and Mann are great, as you'd expect, and Albert Brooks and John Lithgow both bring great performances as two very different father figures. And, yes, there are some really funny sequences, especially a long principal's meeting with angry mother Melissa McCarthy. But that sequence, funny though it is, is emblematic of the film's faults; it's entertaining, but it never really connects with anything, and it's never really followed up on. It's a good individual piece, but the sum ofThis is 40 never manages to connect those pieces into a more solid whole. It's entertaining and intermittently moving, but ultimately too fractured to ever truly work.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
