Between “Bros” and “The Woman King”, it was a good night for overpraising at TIFF. The social media acclaim these two films received was a bit much, let’s all just calm down here.
“Bros,” co-written and starring Billy Eichner is being touted as the first mainstream Hollywood studio romantic comedy to feature gay men as the lead characters.
Directed by Nicholas Stoller, and produced by Judd Apatow, whose comedic DNA is all over this comedy, “Bros” has every studio-backed rom-com cliche you can think of, hell, it even includes clips of “You’ve Got Mail.”
Eichner plays Bobby, a Jewish New Yorker who hosts a popular LGBTQ podcast called 11th Brick. He uses his fame to become the director of the first national LGBTQ history museum, which is about to open. The board meetings are a real hoot to watch.
Bobby is 40 and has spent most of his life hooking up instead of looking for long-term commitment. That is until he meets athletic CrossFit jock Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a club. They hit it off, start “seeing each other” but agree to not commit to any sort of relationship. Sounds familiar?
At first, the banter between the two is quite refreshing and indelibly snappy. The getting-to-know-each-other part of their fling is what works, it’s only when the messy emotions of commitment sneak into the fray that “Bros” strikes out.
At the end of the day, this is very much a sappy love story that could have easily belonged in a 90s rom-com. It’s a very conventional thing this “Bros,” a movie that offers the usual awkward dates and commitment issues, but via a queer point of view. Many of the characters in it don’t feel fully fleshed out, but rather cartoonish and devoid of substance. It ultimately gives off a stink of phoniness.
Eichner’s joke-a-second humor does have its moments, especially when he’s thrusted into situational comedy, but the constant self-awareness of his style was a bit too much for me.
One can embrace “Bros” for its representational significance but also acknowledge that it’s just not original enough to be an essential addition to the comedy canon. [C]
The movie, due to release in 2027, is described as “a haunting Western thriller that follows a retired U.S. Marshal whose forty-year search for his wife’s killer leads him to an outlaw losing his memory.