In a sentenceA hundred minutes of a man being handed the right thing to say and choosing the other one
Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) lives in the suburbs with his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and their teenage son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer), and has nobody he would call a friend. Then a new neighbour arrives: Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), easy in company, sure of himself, the sort of man other men want to stand next to. Austin asks Craig in, then asks him along, and within a few days Craig has a friend for the first time in years and is trying hard not to lose him. He copies Austin’s order at Subway. He meets Austin’s friends, Ian (Whitmer Thomas), Stan (Daniel London), Mike (Eric Rahill) and Nathan (Jacob Ming-Trent), and wants to be one of them. What he does in front of them is where the trouble starts.
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
Tim Robinson’s man who cannot read a room gets a full-length film, and Andrew DeYoung shoots him like a thriller. It is often painfully funny and Paul Rudd is a pleasure; it is also a sketch stretched thin, and by the last half hour it shows.
Tim Robinson’s sketch series I Think You Should Leave is full of men who say the wrong thing and then defend it to the death. Friendship gives one of them a mortgage, a family and a hundred minutes. Craig Waterman has a job, a house, a wife Tami (Kate Mara) and a son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer), and no friends. A new neighbour moves in, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), and asks him in. The film is often painfully funny and Rudd is a pleasure in it. It is also a sketch stretched to feature length, and once the friendship sours, which happens early, it has less to do than it thinks.
Andrew DeYoung, who wrote and directed, made the decision that gives the film its character: he shoots a comedy as if it were a thriller. Andy Rydzewski frames the suburb in wide, level shots under a good deal of grey sky and holds on Robinson’s face well past the point a comedy would cut. Keegan DeWitt’s score is low synths and slow pulses, and it treats a walk to a neighbour’s front door as if someone might not come back from it. Rocio Gimenez fills Austin’s house with records, drums and things picked up on walks, and gives Craig’s a sofa and a large television. Chloe Karmin puts Craig in a padded jacket he never seems to take off.
Robinson’s Craig agrees a beat too late, laughs a beat too early, and when cornered shouts a sentence nobody could have predicted at a volume nobody asked for. The first act, in which Austin takes Craig along on whatever he happens to be doing, is the film’s happiest stretch: Craig is being given what he wants and cannot work out what to do with it. Then Craig meets Austin’s friends, Ian (Whitmer Thomas), Stan (Daniel London), Mike (Eric Rahill) and Nathan (Jacob Ming-Trent), and in the space of one scene does the thing that turns them against him. We will not say what it is. We laughed until it hurt at a Subway order, of all things, with Craig repeating Austin’s sandwich word for word as though it were a password. And there is a stretch near the middle involving a toad, which we will also not describe, where we stopped laughing and sat with a hand over our mouth, which is the film working exactly as intended.
Rudd is the surprise. Austin could have been the straight man; instead Rudd plays someone who has built a personality out of being the cool one on the street and needs an audience more than he would admit. Craig is an audience. Their scenes together, ordering at a Subway, walking home, standing on a doorstep at the moment Austin decides to step back, are the best in the film, because Rudd lets you see Austin enjoying the attention right up until it frightens him.
The second half is where the sketch shows. Craig is on his own, and the film becomes a run of set pieces built the same way: a bad idea, a room of people who can see it is a bad idea, a detonation, and Sophie Corra cutting hard to black. Corra does it well. Done a dozen times, the rhythm becomes a pattern, and we began to know when the shout was coming. Tami is the other casualty. Mara plays her straight and with real patience, but the script gives her a job and a history and never says what she sees in Craig or wants from the marriage. Steven is a good joke and only a joke.
Against the awkward comedies it descends from, this sits closer to The Cable Guy than to Ricky Gervais or Larry David: Craig is not a man who fails to notice he is awful but one who notices and cannot stop. The tagline says men should not have friends; we do not think DeYoung is making a case about lonely men in general. Craig is a specific disaster, and the film is best when it treats him as one.
Watch it with someone, so that there is somebody else to look at when Craig starts talking. It runs a hundred minutes, and it is the right length for about eighty of them.
Most critics come away laughing, and slightly winded. The reviews are largely positive, and the praise gathers around Tim Robinson, whose performance as Craig is widely called the film’s engine: awkward, committed, and painful to sit with. Paul Rudd’s turn as the more likeable friend is nearly as well received, and several critics say the two together make even mundane exchanges funny. A few also credit Kate Mara with keeping the film grounded when it tips into chaos.
The reservations are about staying power. Several critics find the sketch-like structure wears thin over a feature, the plot slight and the last act short of momentum, and the Guardian faults the female characters as under-imagined. Vulture notes it stays within familiar Robinson territory. The spread is fairly wide: two outlets call it the funniest comedy in years, while Variety alone is negative, finding the cringe increasingly incoherent at length and Robinson’s character eventually shutting the audience out.
The critic finds the film an excruciatingly awkward but hilarious comedy. They single out Tim Robinson’s distinctive performance and Paul Rudd’s outstanding turn.
Read the full review →Ehrlich calls it one of the year’s funniest comedies, though some scenes feel insufficiently strange. He praises Tim Robinson’s comic performance and the film’s carefully balanced absurdity and dramatic intent.
Read the full review →Strong finds the film an offbeat, cringe-inducing comedy rather than a consistent knee-slapper. She praises Tim Robinson’s portrayal of Craig and the film’s unsettling, unpredictable energy.
Read the full review →McGeady finds the film nose-bleedingly funny and frequently discomfiting. He singles out Tim Robinson’s performance as a showcase for the comedian’s distinctive talent.
Read the full review →Nicholson finds the film a terrific, painfully funny portrait of male loneliness, though it sometimes keeps its other characters psychologically shallow. She especially praises the comic chemistry between Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, which makes even an ordinary Subway order funny.
Read the full review →The critic finds the comedy impressive and genre-fluid, though its sketch-like structure sometimes wears thin. Tim Robinson’s cringe-perfect performance is singled out as a particular strength.
Read the full review →
The Cable Guy · not on Fi1m yetJim Carrey as the friend who will not go away; darker than its reputation.
The King of ComedyScorsese’s study of a man who mistakes proximity for friendship; the original discomfort.
Toni ErdmannA German father embarrasses his daughter for nearly three hours; funnier and sadder than that sounds.
SightseersBen Wheatley’s caravan holiday, where social awkwardness turns into something much worse.
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson · not on Fi1m yetRobinson’s sketches, where the same man detonates in fifteen minutes rather than a hundred.
