When We First Met is one of those weird movies where it doesn't fit into a single genre. Most websites classify it as a romantic comedy, which it is, but it also has a Fantasy or Sci-Fi element to it, which I find really fascinating. It also has a cast made up of actors that I actually know even if I've never seen anything they've been in, or have only seen one other thing they've been in.
The movie is about Noah (Adam DeVine) who is in love with Avery (Alexandra Daddario). However, Avery is engaged to Ethan (Robbie Amell). Following the engagement party, Noah, who is completely drunk, goes into an old photo booth at the piano bar he works at, and somehow gets transported back three years to Halloween 2014, the night he met Avery. Things don't work out the way he hoped they would, so once this timeline works itself back to 2017, Noah goes back to 2014 to try again. He goes back at least four times and every time the one element he encounters is Avery's friend, Carrie (Shelley Hennig) and slowly he begins to realize that Avery and Ethan are always meant to be together, and that he's supposed to be with someone else.
I'm not a big fan of time travel in fiction. It was used so much in the various Star Trek shows in the '90s and early 2000s and got so convoluted and dumb that I got sick of it pretty quickly. But there are occasions where it works, like on Doctor Who (mostly) and in this movie. And the reason that it works in this movie is because it moves the plot along while not being the focus of the story. We never find out why the photo booth can transport Noah back in time and we don't need to, because it's not important. It doesn't take the viewer out of the story by not explaining the science or magic behind the photo booth time machine. Which I appreciate because so often these movies and TV shows get so bogged down in the explanation of how a scientific concept is possible or of how the technology works, or how the magic works that it gets in the way of the story, which is one of the things that I don't like about Science Fiction and Fantasy.
The cast in this movie is awesome. Adam Devine is hilarious as Noah. I haven't seen a whole lot of the stuff he's in, but I recently saw him in a season 4 episode of Community where he played Jeff's step brother, Willy, and he voiced the Flash in The Lego Batman Movie which I haven't watched since I saw it in theatres back in 2017, oddly enough when parts of this movie take place. He apparently also appeared on Modern Family, but I've only seen a few episodes of that show and I don't remember if I saw him in any of the ones I've watched. And I've still never seen the Pitch Perfect movies, and he's in those as well.
I know that Alexandra Daddario was in both Percy Jackson movies, but I've never seen them. I also haven't seen her in any other TV show or movie before, so this was my first encounter with her. She was pretty decent in the movie. Despite being on the movie poster, she isn't in the movie all that much. Most of the times that Avery appears it's the exact same scene, where she and Noah have their first meeting at the Halloween party and depending on how each timeline goes, she shows up more or less during that cycle. The most screen time Avery has in the movie is during the second cycle where Noah acts like a jerk and he and Avery end up in a purely sexual relationship, and Noah goes running with Avery, Carrie and Ethan.
Robbie Amell is probably the actor I've seen in the most things out of the entire cast. I mean he played Ronnie Raymond on The Flash, he played the lead role of Stephen Jameson on The Tomorrow People, and he played Mae Whitman's love interest/Bella Thorne's boyfriend in The DUFF as well. He's also been in other movies like the Scooby-Doo prequel movie, Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins as Fred, and in American Pie Presents: Beta House but I haven't seen either of those movies, so I don't know if they're any good or not. Oh and despite also being on the movie poster, Robbie is in even less of this movie than Alexandra Daddario is.
The final cast member I wanna talk about is Shelley Hennig, who plays Avery's best friend, Carrie. Shelley Hennig is probably the actress I'm least familiar with as the only thing I know off the top of my head that she's in is Teen Wolf. And the only thing I know about her character on that show, Malia, is that she doesn't show up until season 3 and then is there until the show ended in 2017 and this is basically the first movie she did after that show ended. Unlike the other members of the movie's main cast, she's the one I've never seen in anything besides this and that I know the least about in terms of her filmography. She's really good in this movie though. In fact, Carrie is probably my favourite character in the entire movie as she's the one that gets Noah to realize that he and Avery were never going to happen over the course of the movie. Their chemistry is absolutely amazing in the movie too. Like there's this one scene they have together, in the cycle where Noah and Avery are engaged, he's rich and super busy with work, and Avery is still in love with Ethan, and Noah is with Carrie in the kitchen and he asks her why Avery doesn't love him, and she is at a loss for words because she has no way of explaining it to him. And the way they play off each other is great.
My favourite scene in this movie is during the first time travel cycle where Noah doesn't realize what's happening so he walks up to 2014 Carrie, who he won't meet until later that day, and treats her like they've known each other for three years, creeping her out. My favourite scenes come after that though where Noah is about to succeed with Avery when Carrie comes home and starts freaking out because she recognizes him as the dude who approached her earlier that day and then she and Avery start freaking out and then Carrie picks up a potted tree and hits him over the head with it. And then later, when he gets back to 2017, not realizing that anything has changed, he goes back to Avery's place to apologize to her and Ethan for his behaviour at their engagement party, and Avery recognizes him, screams for Carrie, who comes out and attacks him again, and then Ethan gets in on the action and Noah gets them to back off by saying he has a bomb. So then, as Noah escapes Ethan yells out to him, "Yeah, next time you'd better come back with more than a bomb!" and Avery is like, "No babe, no" and then Ethan is like, "I mean less than a bomb!" like an idiot. That entire chain of events had me laughing so hard because it's so ridiculous that Noah has no clue about what's going on even though he looked at the date on the newspaper at the convenience store before he runs into Carrie.
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall, When We First Met is not the greatest film ever, but it's an entertaining movie that had me laughing the entire time. The cast is brilliant, the story isn't great, but the premise is pretty good and I had a great time watching it. I probably would've liked it a bit better if we'd gotten to see Noah and Avery's friendship a little more. We know why Avery would want to be friends with Noah, but we don't really get to see why Noah would fall in love with Avery let alone be friends with her. And that's mostly due to the fact that they spend so little screen time together that we don't really see their relationship develop. Especially when we find out that most of Avery's interests actually came from Carrie, similar to how Rachel Bilson's interests in the yellow umbrella episode of How I Met Your Mother turned out to be Tracy's interests, revealing that Ted was dating the wrong woman. Except it works better on the show than it does in the movie, just because it's a forgettable thing until we meet Tracy near the end of the series, and it works as a satisfying pay off. Here it just makes us wonder why Noah is in love with Avery in the first place. For that I'm giving When We First Met 8/10 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment