She's Out of My League

Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much.

The joke of She's Out of My League – let’s call it a joke, because it’s sometimes almost funny – is that romantic compatibility can be organised according to a numerical system. Any former adolescents who waited forever for Bo Derek to take her swimsuit off in Ten know the perfect score. In those Hollywood casting sessions, for some obscure reason it’s always the girl who maxes out. You get your comedy from pairing her with a runt – a shorty like Dudley Moore in Ten, or Steve Carell’s 40-year-old virgin or that fat hairy bear in Knocked Up. One could go on. The point is that the runt always scores a six. As the hero’s douchebag sidekick explains in She’s Out of My League, no one can date anyone more than two points up the scale.

As a character, the girl is an absolute zero, a machine-tooled nullity

Apart from in Hollywood, of course, where they seem to pipe this boilerplate looker-falls-for-dork wish-fulfilment into the multiplexes like dealers pushing crack on street corners. The young male demographic that mainlines these films will keep coming back if enough of this toxic mush keeps getting pumped into their bloodstream. It’s Loaded fed through a projector.

It’s a feature of She’s Out of My League that, as a character, the girl is an absolute zero, a machine-tooled nullity. She has a name – Molly – but no discernible personality. The most real thing about her is her webbed toes, which for the record are nothing like as charming as the enigmatic Marina's in Local Hero. And where has Hollywood gone this time to find an actress who can sweetly overflow the variety of low-cut dresses the designers pour her into? The unusual answer is England. Normally they come to us for villains, but in She’s Out of My League it’s Alice Eve who gets to play pin-up.

None of this is Eve’s fault. Judi Dench herself could have done little with such strenuously achieved blandness. Eve's genetic inheritance has given her the goods for this sort of work. Her character’s parents, incidentally, are here played by Eve’s real ones, Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan (though she looks a lot more like a young Joanna Lumley than either of them). Clearly a stepping stone to better things, if nothing else it's a test for her acting chops to keep looking convinced. The script is no help at all. Even when she reveals to a poolful of apes that she’s got nothing on under her dress it’s oddly uninteresting. It would be out of character if only she had one.

If Eve is from one department of central casting, Jay Baruchel is from another: the one where they keep the losers with spindly limbs and indented chests. Other than a minor gift for crinkle-eyed self-deprecation, you never fully get why Molly falls for Kirk, who like all his friends works in airline security, other than that he’s not manifestly horrible. In short, they're made for each other: void meets vacancy.

Any of this sounding familiar? If not, they don’t mind reminding you. Kirk’s disapproving best friend recalls the romantic mismatch of Great Expectations, as if the frontman of a Hall and Oates tribute band would have ever heard of Pip and Estella. One character – in the interests of lazy allusion, these films always have someone who suffers from an infantilised obsession with kids’ movies – sees elements of Beauty and the Beast. “But that’s a cartoon,” says another of the sidekicks. Er, and this isn’t?

In fact, unlike almost any cartoon from Pixar or DreamWorks, the script is the purest flab. The jokes seem unfinessed, the set pieces unshackled to the wider picture, the writing random and incomplete. The loveliest moment in the film is when Kirk introduces Molly to his parents, who are speechless with comic delight. But for the most part the film wants to have its cake and stuff it down in one gulp, to subvert the expectations of romantic comedy while remaining equally eager to fulfil them. She’s Out of My League is so bent on pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes it even makes Pittsburgh look like some sleek sun-drenched super-city. We don't give ratings on theartsdesk but the circs call for an exception. This one's a straight two.

Watch the trailer