Yes Man

I liked YES MAN. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed as a lesser entry in the style of comedy I'm coming to think of as the Apatow school. It doesn't have a villain, its third-act crisis is organic to its story, and its characters mean well. Hey, it's even reasonably funny. I laughed three or four times.

Would it have been better with Jason Segel in the lead instead of serial over-actor Jim Carrey? Sure. Am I beginning to despair of seeing Zooey Deschanel in something that requires her to do more than act cute? Yeah. But there it is.

YES MAN tells the story of Carl, a guy who works at a bank in Brea, yet flits from Griffith Park to Balboa Park without a second thought. He's nearly fifty, yet he acts like a guy who's closing in on thirty. His improbably young and attractive ex-wife left him because he always says no. He's about to lose his improbably young and attractive best friend because he always says no. And he's never getting out of his bullet-in-the-head job because he always says no. But one day, he allows a nutty friend (Whom you can tell is genuine because he dresses like a hippie. In American films, genuine people always dress like hippies.) to talk him into attending a self help / quasi religious seminar dedicated to getting people to say yes. So far, so good. I can get behind a life-embracing ideology - I just don't want to smell like patchouli oil. This ideology requires no patchouli oil and it's led by Terence Stamp, which is pretty cool. Further, it requires neither a significant monetary outlay nor kneeling before Zod. Carl chooses well: he goes for it and embrace the culture of Yes.

Before you know it, the guy's in the middle of a full-bloom midlife crisis. He gets a new improbably young and attractive girlfriend. He learns to play the guitar. He takes flying lessons. He goes to all-night parties where one can assume he makes the other attendees uncomfortable because he's old enough to be, like, their dad, man. He's ridin' the groove train, baby, and he's livin' like he'll never run out of Viagra and Motrin.

That's your setup, and it's a perfectly fine frame upon which to hang a series of jokes and gags that should make you smile from time to time, grin occasionally, and even laugh if you're an easy touch like me. But Carrey's gotta embrace the fact that America's tired of watching him mug his way through pictures. Settle down, Jim, and insist on the rewrites that'll make it seem as if you weren't shoehorned into a younger man's story. Do that, and I'll invest much more in your character. And when I really invest in your character, that's when the real laughter comes.