By Emilio Frenk.
Directors: Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein
Cast: Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Emily Ratajkowski, Rory Scovel, Aidy Bryan, Busy Phillips, Naomi Campbell, Lauren Hutton, Tom Hopper, Sasheer Zamata, Dave Attell and Dave Martinez.
Rating: Poor.
Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, writers of “Never Been Kissed” and “The Vow” make their directorial debut with “I Feel Pretty” and it was an unfortunate one.
The movie centers in Renee Bennett (Amy Schumer) a woman who constantly struggles with her insecurity due to her appearance.
Everything will change for her when she suffers a fall during a spinning class and begins to believe that she is the most beautiful and capable girl in the world.
From that moment Renee´s attitude will have an amazing turn which leads her to land a job to a cosmetics company with CEO Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams) and eventually a love interest named Ethan (Rory Scovel).
This emotional change in Renee will represent an opportunity for her to be herself regardless of her physical appearance or going be back to her old self again, which she will try to avoid at all costs.
One of the things that I noticed in “I Feel Pretty” was that there are moments from movies like “Big” and “What Women Want”. This is one thing that I don´t mind and it´s completely valid that filmmakers use that influence towards their work.
The problem that I really saw in this film was in terms of story. The screenplay also written by both Kohn and Silverstein was flat all the times and by moments the character of Renee didn´t transmit anything to me.
I felt the film was completely predictable and when you know exactly what is going to happen in a film it stops being funny and those elements of surprise that you think a film has, they slowly vanish.
I do like Amy Schumer and I consider one of the funniest women in film but here she got me on my nerves. Yes, I admit that they were moments that she was very funny but most of the time was over the top.
Another issue that I had was Michelle Williams, who I consider her a fantastic actress but here I didn´t buy her performance. The voice that she used on her film was irritating and I understand that it was part of the character but it could have been better with better dialogue.
Going back to the screenplay the reason that it needed more work was in term of character development.
On a positive note I did like the love story between Amy Schumer´s character and Rory Scovel. The chemistry on both does work and you can tell they did everything they could but again the cast won´t save a film when weak screenplay is involved. This film did had potential but unfortunately was driven to the wrong direction and I hope that this is a lesson for both Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein.
“I Feel Pretty” is one of the biggest disappointments in comedy this season and I cannot recommend it.