Kirk Kettner (Knocked Up's Jay Baruchel) is a walking worst case scenario - he has the body of a nerd, the ambition of a stoner and the self-esteem of a twelve-year old girl. At the beginning of She's Out Of My League, he's busy concocting all of the ways he can win back his ex-girlfriend Marnie (Sabrina, The Teenage Witch's Lindsay Sloane). He's the kind of guy who makes Kate Bush mix tapes and mumbles. A lot.
Kirk's only semblance of a support group are his friends from work. He's a Transportation Security Administration officer at Pittsburgh International Airport, toiling alongside the handsome Jack (Cloverfield's Mike Vogel), teddy bear Devon (Get Smart's Nate Torrence) and über-slacker Stainer (Cloverfield's T.J. Miller, a physical combination of Seth Rogen and Jon Heder). If there's one thing these guys can all agree on, it's that Kirk doesn't offer much to the ladies.
She's Out Of My League - The Dating Scale Never Lies
While these jokers should be working on advancing their careers or bettering themselves, they instead spend their free time bowling while hashing out the intricacies of their attractiveness and how they rate on a scale of one to ten. Kirk has been deemed a "5", which doesn't bode well when he hits it off with "hard 10" Molly McCall (Alice Eve) after she lands in his security line at the airport. Conveniently, Molly forgets her phone - giving Kirk a reason to link up with her when she returns from a New York business trip.
Molly is the polar opposite of Kirk - attractive, self confident and successful in her career as a high-paid party planner. Kirk's only aspirations are to someday become a pilot, which is exactly what Molly's ex boyfriend Cam (Geoff Stults) is. Despite their inherent lack of compatibility, the pair hit it off and engage in a series of dates that invariably involve Kirk being embarrassed. He's constantly mistaken for a waiter at a fancy restaurant. He blows the first encounter with Molly's parents after soiling his pants. Rinse and repeat.
Alice Eve's Molly - She's Not Wearing Any Underwear
While it strains belief, Molly usually keeps coming back for more punishment. She even fails to recoil in horror when meeting Kirk's demented family. His abusive brother Dylan (Kyle Bornheimer) loves pummeling him out of the blue and besting him at hockey "slapshot regatta" bouts in the basement. His parents (Debra Jo Rupp, Adam LeFevre) have so fallen in love with Marnie that they plan on taking both her and her new boyfriend Ron (Hayes MacArthur) on a family trip to Branson, Missouri.
All of these painful encounters with the boorish denizens of this film feel a bit strung together, and the script (by John Morris and Sean Anders) tries too hard to capture the anarchic potty mouthery found in any given Judd Apatow-related project. Still, outrageous hijinks like a friendly testicular shaving montage generate laughs even though they feel a bit forced. Nothing here's ever quite as dazzlingly funny as Anders' own 2008 comedy Sex Drive.
Scrawny Jay Baruchel Saves The Day With Charm
First time feature director Jim Field Smith may not be an Apatow or even a Greg Mottola, but he knows how to frame an image and draws decent results from the largely unknown cast. Which is where the film shines - the charismatic Baruchel comes across as a nerdy version of a young Robert DeNiro saddled with the voice of Matthew Broderick. Without his awkward charm, the audience would never be able to buy the relationship with the seemingly perfect Molly.
As a comedic date movie, it hits the right beats and delivers enough to guffaw at while mining legitimate relationship issues. Viewers may wonder if they haven't seen all of this before in countless other films, and certainly She's Out Of My League doesn't deliver any examples of stunning originality. Yet it's the overall affability of its cast that renders many of these complaints moot. This film may not be a "hard 10", but it's got a certain something that helps it get by nonetheless. Grade: B-
- She's Out Of My League (2010)
- Directed by Jim Field Smith
- Written by Sean Anders and John Morris
- Starring Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve, T.J. Miller, Krysten Ritter
- Running time: 104 Minutes
- Released by: Dreamworks / Paramount Pictures
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