Brandon at Random Reviews

I saw this listed for free on Amazon Prime under their original content section and I thought it could be a good motivational story. Hell, it could even be downright relatable if it wasn’t careful. A down-on-her-luck woman is told by a doctor that she needs to lose weight before she starts having to deal with certain health issues associated with being obese.

Jillian Bell (who you’ve probably seen in stuff, she was in that movie with the kid from the Magic Mike movies but the sequel with the guy from that movie with the son from Arrested Development, you know the one) plays Brittany, who is having trouble keeping steady work or behaving minimally professional at all at her jobs. She’s clearly in a bit of a rut, having friction with her roommate, and we see how impersonal or aggressively moody she comes off to the people around her. The other people in this movie sometimes seem familiar, but I wouldn’t know them by name so I’m gonna spare myself looking them all up on IMDb.

Brittany starts to get into running and the friends she makes through that group decide they all want to enter the New York Marathon as a new ambitious goal to accomplish for themselves. She then starts actively trying to find some better work. She lands a job house-sitting for a family that is out of town, where she soon meets her night shift counterpart, a man named Jern. The two of them have an interesting dynamic and we see real growth in their interactions together over time (as we should).

Brittany faces a lot of obstacles in training for the marathon. She continues to push people and the support they offer away. It’s like, aggressively unpleasant to watch unfold. Pretty much everything she does, in either trying to be funny or basically telling people off to put distance between her and them, is seemingly deliberately awful on purpose, it is really well done to be honest.

The things I have listed are all well executed, but I find myself not entertained by this one. Like she’s supposed to be a lovable screw up who wants to turn it around, but by the time she actually starts to show some semblance of maturity and growth it feels as though it’s too little too late. Like I can’t relate to her. I don’t like her at this point. What has she really done to show she’s not still a big jerk deep down and completely selfish. But I guess I’m happy for her by the end. In the same way you’d be happy for a friend that hadn’t personally wronged you but you would never under any circumstance want to hang out with.

Like I said, this one is on Amazon Prime Video. It’s not terrible, it’s also not great at all. It’s never particularly funny for my taste. It also struggles to be relatable, you can’t have a hateable protagonist in stories like this and be successful. I can see why the IMDb ratings for this flick are all so aggressively polarized. So I’m gonna hang out in the middle.

⭐️⭐️1/2