The creative duo behind the 2019 buddy comedy The Climb have returned with similar material, greater star power and one of the most hilarious beta male punch-ups in cinema history. The star power is provided by Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona (Hit Man), while the comedy material is another exploration of the delicate interplay between close friendship and marital fidelity. But first, to the fight.
After an audacious opening chapter featuring a motorway crash, a marital breakdown and a scene of indecent exposure, our soft and sensitive teacher hero Carey (Kyle Marvin, also a co-writer) sleeps with Julie (Dakota Johnson), the wife of his best friend, Paul (Michael Angelo Covino, also a co-writer and the director). It’s fine, though, because Julie and Paul have recently revealed that their marriage is open and they are practitioners of ethical nonmonogamy. Carey’s night of passion with Julie will thus be received by Paul with nary a flicker of interest. That’s the theory.
Instead, on discovering the ostensible betrayal, Paul smacks Carey hard across the face. Twice. Carey returns a blow. Both men are apologetic. And then it begins. It’s a fight sequence, set in Paul’s lush Long Island beach home, so preposterous, so protracted, so silly yet somehow so violent (think Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary meets John Wick) that it instantly becomes a smackdown classic, up there with the midpoint donnybrook from Atomic Blonde, but with added apologies.
The film that follows explores the pendulum-swinging power dynamics in the subsequently broken marriages of both men. Paul is revealed to be hiding more than personal infidelities while Carey spans the movie trying to avoid the reality that his short marriage to the life coach Ashley (Arjona) is beyond salvation.
Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) end up fighting in a hilairous scene
This is a beautifully written and played film, with shades of Woody Allen and Nora Ephron. Here all the characters, even the supporting roles such as Ashley’s bartender fling Jackson (Charlie Gillespie, exquisitely funny), are crafted with tender understanding and affection. It meanders in the middle, however, and a film with a less developed milieu might have died there. Plus the casting of Johnson and Arjona as the adorable wives of two unassuming, clueless and self-declared dolts seems to smack of wish fulfilment, especially when Julie appears beguiled by Paul’s stalking and coercive control, and when Ashley is seemingly enamoured by Carey’s consistently exposed manhood. Funny, yes, and possibly authentic, but also drifting perilously close to a manosphere fantasy.
★★★☆☆
15, 105min
In cinemas
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