Review: The Rewrite (2014)

Chilling out on the sofa with my cousin and we both have pretty hefty hangovers so we didn’t want anything too heavy so had a rifle through Netflix and found a good old Hugh Grant film, generally I have liked most of Hugh Grant’s rom coms in the past so it seemed like a good choice.

I remember seeing the trailer for this last year now! All I can recall is the line 'Ryan?! Reynolds or Gosling?!'

Keith Michaels (Hugh Grant) is a failing Hollywood writer who has to take a job at a University in Binghamton in order to pay his bills having only really written one memorable script, Paradise Misplaced.  He refuses to help the students as he believes that writing can’t be taught, he lies and tells them he is researching for his next script, sleeps with a student and gets on the wrong side of the wrong teacher, Mary Weldon (Alison Janey).

As soon as I saw Alison Janey and JK Simmons in the opening credits I was so excited, it couldn’t be bad with these two legends in it.  Let me put this bluntly, The Rewrite needed a rewrite, in fact it should have just been scrapped all together.  The lead characters were unlikeable and mostly irritating, the story was utterly predictable and lacked any comedy value whatsoever and two of my favourite actors (Alison Janey and JK Simmons) were completely wasted.

Admittedly, I nearly turned the movie off after about 20 minutes. I had to wonder, were we meant to hate Hugh Grant's character so much? He plays arrogance very well and I appreciate that, but this time it just seemed a bit too much. I hate not finishing a movie though, so I vowed to stick with it.

I watched it until the end just to see if there was some mad twist that I wasn’t expecting (there wasn’t) but countless times I just wanted to turn it off and give up (the biggest issue with this was that it was on Netflix not the TV so I would have had to drag myself off the sofa to the computer to change it and with the hangover, that just wasn’t happening!).  I’ve since read some positive reviews for it and in reading them I wished I felt the same (because I love a Hugh Grant movie) but it just didn’t keep me entertained or make me laugh, at all.  As I mentioned, I didn’t like the main characters and I also didn’t think they had any chemistry, they could have just as easily finished it with them being just friends and I don’t think it would have affected my opinion in the slightest.

It took a while but I did enjoy The Rewrite in the end! It's certainly not the best rom com out there and I can't be sure how memorable it'll be either, but it made a nice Sunday evening chill out movie. Oh, I do miss Hugh Grant you know. This kind of makes me want to re-watch Bridget Jones' Diary...

I really wished I liked this but I just didn’t, maybe Mr Grant needs to spread his wings and try out something other than your typical romcom?