What a beautiful movie title. Sometimes people need to hear this but nobody tells them, and it's good that this movie tells it to your face like a slap, and then you just have to take it like a champ. Of course, I wasn't going through a time I had to hear this when I heard it---because obviously I am a big girl and I had faced this fact on my own already (like a real champ).
I watched this movie on a plane. Well, it was already on my list and then when I saw that it was available, I decided to watch it. Why was it on my list? I saw a scene from the movie in a reel on Instagram, which, in fact, I haven't seen in the movie when I saw the movie. On Instagram they often write the movie name wrong. Oh well. Still, I am glad I watched this movie.
At the beginning of the movie, everything was going well for me. They were showing all these idiot guys and asshole types. And I felt good because I was like "yeah, I know that one!", "oh yeah, of course!", "yeah, if he does that it means he's garbage (checkmark)", etc. However, I must admit, I also thought "where was this movie before? I had to learn all this stuff by myself. If I knew, I would just watch this movie and learn!". Anyway, as they always say in education: hands-on experience is the best way to learn(!).
But then, things have started changing (in the movie). I am pretty sure the movie was giving the message 'there are no good guys out there' in the first part (and also they made this woman who was still searching for someone look like a hopeless case). Now, when things started changing in the movie, they started showing stuff that implies something like 'good guys exists too and not everything is so bad in life'. Of course, I was extremely skeptical watching these parts. But they did get to me by the end. Oh well.
So, after the movie I was a completely changed person who then started to believe that there is maybe a 0.001% chance that not all guys are idiots. Okay. I don't mean to offend anyone personally here--it's just a general statement, and let's put aside all those who are already 'taken' (okay, maybe only a subset of them too), but there is a lot that goes under 'idiot' when I say it and it's my own definition, so hopefully no-one gets offended.
We must send thanks to Ben Affleck for facilitating this metamorphosis of mine. I am also not used to seeing him as such a good guy. But, you want to know what happened for the rest of my flight time? I ended up watching two more Ben Affleck movies! By the time I reached my destination, there was nothing but Ben Affleck's face in my head. Thankfully, I shook it off pretty quickly---mostly because of my great talent of being really bad with faces.
Now, you might be wondering why my mind being full of Ben Affleck's face and nothing else is a bad thing, right? Like, what's there to shake off, and perhaps one could always live with an image of Ben Affleck's face in one's head. But...unfortunately, life is never that simple. Ben Affleck's face reminds me of at least two people from my past and I really don't like the association. The association was not so strong, but still. So you should be really careful when you're gonna go on a movie spree like I did.
Jokes aside and continuing reviewing the movie, I should say the following. The movie indeed started well and was going well, but then I do think they messed up and as a whole it gives mixed signals (oh wait, that reminds me of something...hmm so meta!). So in fact, when they showed that Ben Affleck's character was not actually a douchebag, they are giving this idea to women to have hope that maybe their douchebag partner is also not a douchebag and will change one day. And they really shouldn't do this. Well, okay, more broadly, the message was that "there are no rules to this and everyone's story is of their own" but then the movie doesn't really teach you anything new either. In any case, perhaps one positive thing I can say is not exactly about the movie but the movie came out in 2009 and I watched it in 2025, and it looks like the stuff about romantic relationships were the same when there were no smartphones or social media like today. Okay, how is that even a positive thing? It's not. It's just an observation.
When I started writing this review I was thinking I would give it 8/10, but I guess that's just parallel to how I felt in the first half of the movie, and if I really go back to what I thought of the movie at the end of the movie, I cannot give 8/10. I have to take off more points...I mean, at the end of the movie, Ben Affleck's character even agreed to give up on wearing cargo pants for the woman he loved, who even does that, right? So, in the end, perhaps the 0.001% change in my beliefs was actually due to Justin Long's character Alex, but they didn't offer any of his movies on the plane, so I watched The Accountant movies instead.
I give 6/10.
