Star Rating:

Home Again

Director: Hallie Meyers-Shyer

Actors: Nat Wolff, Lake Bell

Release Date: Friday 29th September 2017

Genre(s): Drama, Factual, Romance

Running time: 97 minutes

Reese Witherspoon might be one of the most impressive actors working in Hollywood today. In terms of career longevity, quality of material and eclectic balance of said material, the Oscar winner has continually shone. Where she's faltered, arguably, has been when she's chosen overtly commercial films to star in - This Means War and Just Like Heaven etc. This is by far the worst of the bunch.

Home Again is the debut film of Hallie Meyers-Shyer, the daughter of Nancy Meyers, who has given us the likes of Father of the Bride and It's Complicated. Meyers-Shyer writes and directs the story of a single mother who goes on the lash, meets three lads, has drinks back in her place, then uses them as makeshift babysitters and begins a pseudo relationship with the smuggest one.

Witherspoon's Alice Kinney is the daughter of an Oscar winning filmmaker and, as it would happen, the three young men are all budding filmmakers; well, less budding more over-achieving given they have a bunch of meetings with a hot shot horror producer (Veep's Reid Scott) with a bang of Jason Blum off of him. There's also her absent former husband (Michael Sheen) who returns to the fold when he finds out there are random men living in his gaff with his two young daughters. Fair enough, like.

This is the kind of film that tries to convince us that its main character is *coughs* just like us because she has a richer boss, who is sort of mean to her - a criminally underused Lake Bell. That is all Meyers has in the locker to make Alice in any way relatable to those of us who have never been in a Donnybrook Fair. Witherspoon does her best and there are welcome respites in the form of Candice Bergen (it's Murphy Brown!) as Alice's far cooler mother, encouraging her to loosen up.

The trio of hip, young struggling Brooklyn filmmakers make the crew in Entourage look like they fell out of a Mike Leigh film. They are painfully underwritten and unrealistic - as is pretty much every exchange between them. Even how they dress, you're like REALLY? With the exception of former Saturday Night Live star Jon Rudnitsky, it's odd casting too and the poor writing doesn't help the sitcom set-up.

This is just a film that shoots shamelessly broad and fails on pretty much every front. Witherspoon is coming off of a career highlight in the cracking HBO series Big Little Lies and Home Again is firmly at the opposite end of the quality spectrum.