Someone Great (2019)
Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson
An aspiring music journalist lands her dream job and is about to move to San Francisco when her boyfriend of nine years decides to call it quits. To nurse her broken heart, she and her two best friends spend one outrageous last adventure in New York City.
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8 films that influenced Someone Great
What critics say influenced Someone Great
Someone Great is best pitched as Bridesmaids meets 500 Days of Summer — it’s a female led comedy with heartbreak, self-worth and self-realization at its core.
That’s the difference between a stellar Bridesmaids and Girls Trip and meh copycats like Rough Night and Ibiza .
Someone Great borrows from the post- Bridesmaids canon of excellent, raunchy comedies driven by friendship between women.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: As adorable as Stanfield and Rodriguez are together, the real emotional core of the film is the friendship between Jenny, Blair and Erin, who are hilarious—so the titles that come to mind are Bridesmaids and Broad City .
If you’ll allow me to finally play the gender card, this is a disservice to female audiences who have been craving this kind of finely-crafted, debaucherous touchstone since “Bridesmaids” ignited this fire eight years ago.
Think: Girls Trip , Bachelorette , or another Netflix release, Ibiza .
Hot on the heels of “Girls Trip” and “Rough Night” comes “Someone Great,” Netflix’s contribution to the “girls’ night out” genre.
Since then, female audiences haven’t had much to hang onto except for “Girls Trip” in 2017.
It calls to mind the “Ain’t No Sunshine” sequence from Notting Hill , and captures Robinson’s ability to work within a genre while elevating and expanding it at the same time.
Someone Great is best pitched as Bridesmaids meets 500 Days of Summer — it’s a female led comedy with heartbreak, self-worth and self-realization at its core.
On the romance front, it 500 Days of Summer (a film I love), but the feminine energy version of that.
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Someone Great is not quite as notable as the biggest films in Netflix’s 2018 romantic comedy renaissance—the lovers’ romp of Set It Up , or the horny fantasy of The Kissing Booth.
It’s not quite as charming or winning as recent originals To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before or Set It Up .
The film is both raunchy and emotional, and is backed by an outstanding cast in Gina Rodriguez (Jane The Virgin), Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect, Hairspray), and Dewanda Wise (She’s Gotta Have It).
Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson did TV’s “Sweet/Vicious” a few years back, and she and her players — Gina Rodriguez of “Jane the Virgin,” DeWanda Wise of Netflix’s “She’s Gotta Have It” and the reliably cute and funny Brittany Snow of the “Pitch Perfect” movies — hurl so much slang, so many topical references and use the drugs of the moment (weed and Molly), it’s as if they’ve stuffed a TV season’s worth of sassy/witty banter into a 90 minute movie.
Squad Goals: One pitfall of the emergent genre of movies and TV shows using rom-com tropes to tell stories about female friendship (think the Pitch Perfect franchise or Freeform’s The Bold Type , which shares a lot of DNA with Someone Great ) is that they’re sometimes a little too hesitant to move past simplistic “Yass bitch!” uplift into something more nuanced.
I’ve loved Snow since Pitch Perfect , and while her character here is not dissimilar from that one, she nails the quiet simmer of a “nice girl” who’s actually Fed Up.
But there’s plenty of loony chemistry to fill in the gaps, mostly emanating from its three headlining women: She’s Gotta Have It ’s Wise, fantastic as a dry-witted lesbian with pathological commitment issues; Pitch Perfect alum Snow, a type-A blonde who gets a lot more fun after two shots of tequila; and Rodriguez, the kind of endearingly flawed heroine you feel like you’d actually want to lay on the floor with on a hungover Sunday.
Someone Great is not quite as notable as the biggest films in Netflix’s 2018 romantic comedy renaissance—the lovers’ romp of Set It Up , or the horny fantasy of The Kissing Booth.
But like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, it’s smart and sweet for what it is—a subdued, relationship-heavy The Hangover .