Trainwreck

Trainwreck (15)

USA 2015  125 mins  Dir: Judd Apatow  Starring: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Brie Larson, Tilda Swinton

We make a pact with these big mainstream American bad behaviour comedies. Our promise is that we’ll try to refrain from vomiting into our family-sized popcorn buckets if they deliver at least two acts of filth and degeneracy before betraying their characters with a lot of ghastly, reactionary family values crap. Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck reneges on that unspoken agreement at an alarmingly early stage, even as we’re cheering on its refreshingly promiscuous, defiantly single, drunken, pot-smoking female protagonist. Breath-of-noxious-air Amy Schumer eats up the role like Renee Zellweger’s slutty, potty-mouthed evil twin, but her script fizzles out quicker than one of her character’s prematurely ejaculating one-night-stands (of whom four are credited).

It kicks off in terrific style with a father giving his two young daughters a pre-divorce lecture on why monogamy doesn’t work (“What if I told you that was the only doll you were allowed to play with your entire life? How would you feel?”). Twenty-three years later, journalist Amy (Schumer) has taken this sermon to heart. She enjoys a string of one night stands, falls asleep the moment she’s satisfied and gets rid of her conquests as swiftly as possible. Yep, the joke here is that she behaves just like a bloke. Amy treats her boring, happily married sister Kim (Larson) with undisguised contempt and eventually winds up dating a self-regarding closeted gay body-builder whose true sexuality erupts whenever he gets into a fight with another man (“You’re an asshole! You know what I do with assholes? I lick ’em!”). She works at a terrible lad mag named S’nuff (Sample features: How to beat off at work; You’re not gay – she’s boring; You call those tits?) that somehow seems to have survived the millennial cull of such things under the editorship of Dianne (a scene-stealing Swinton, giving it the full monstrous Essex-girl-made-good twist on Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada).

So far, so funny. Now here’s that bad stuff. The steely grip of romcom formula takes hold the moment Amy is assigned to write a story about sports surgeon Aaron Conners (Hader). Worse still, his profession facilitates a bunch of gags and cameos that will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a close follower of US sports. To be fair, LeBron James – a famous basketball player, according to my well-informed chum Mr. Wikipedia – proves to be quite a gifted comedian. And even as the film squanders its early promise on dreary romance with the mandatory twist of heart-tuggin’ tragedy, Hader and Schumer make an agreeably unconventional screen couple. But it’s hard not to feel cheated after that avalanche of advance publicity claiming that Schumer was here to shake up the tired romcom genre. Maybe someone will have the courage to let her off the leash next time.