Long Shot ★★½
ROMANTIC comedies do not need to be two hours long.
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is one of the very best and it clocks in at just over 90 minutes.
If you can’t efficiently tell a simple ‘boy meets girl, loses girl, regains girl’ story with a dozen or so laugh-out-loud moments, then you’re up against it.
Audiences will enjoy it only for so long, although admittedly films like Sleepless in Seattle are also rare exceptions.
What about Love Actually or Four Weddings and a Funeral I hear you asking?
Those films aren’t simple because they have multiple story lines and romances to deal with. So there.
Long Shot from 2019 is a good example of what I’m talking about.
Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron are an unlikely but realistic pairing for most of the film, but even their chemistry and performances can’t sustain a script that doesn’t know when to end.
Rogen plays a left-wing, crusading but very annoying journalist named Fred Flarsky who quits his job in disgust when the parent company is taken over by a right-wing media conglomerate lead by sleazy millionaire Parker Wembley, played by an unrecognisable Andy Serkis, whose beliefs include that hurricanes are caused by gay marriage.
Theron is Charlotte Field, the US Secretary of State who suddenly discovers the President plans to retire, opening her potential window to run for the highest office.
President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk) is completely useless but inexplicably popular. Previously a television actor he has unexpectedly decided to use his first-term popularity to get his coveted career in the movies.
In flashback we learn that Field was Flarsky’s baby-sitter and he had a crush on her during his teenage years. A decade or so later they meet again at a fund-raising party and Field offers Flarsky a job sparking up her speeches.
Field is a great politician and leader but the back room people tell her she lacks the mass popularity required to be a presidential candidate and needs to show more of her human side.
Cue Flarsky who knows more about her than anybody else.
There are plenty of clever lines and the characters are tremendously engaging when sharing the screen, but the story gets bogged down with too detailed a mechanism for their predictable falling-out, courtesy of him believing she wanted to save the world through a global environmental plan that is lowly compromised and eroded.
There is also a sequence involving a terrorist attack that could have easily been dropped completely.
Director Jonathan Levine has had a mixed track record, including Snatched, The Night Before, Warm Bodies and 50/50, and Long Shot continues this trend.
I think Levine wanted to ensure the political world within which the film is based was authentically presented, asking Liz Hannah, who wrote the political/journalism drama The Post to assist television comedy writer Dan Sterling with this script.
But the move has a two-fold, counter effect. Firstly, it creates a situation where the comic moments force the authenticity to bend to the points where it becomes unbelievable and, secondly, it just adds unnecessary running time.
By the way, Alexander Skarsgard provides an odd but interesting couple of interludes as a narcissistic Canadian Prime Minister. More supporting moments like his would have better padded out the proceedings.