Girl Most Likely

Imogene (Kristen Wiig) is living happily in New York with her soon-to-be-husband, burdgeoning writing career and enviable Manhattan apartment, or at least that’s what she thinks. In a very small amount of time, her boyfriend dumps her, she’s fired from her job, and she can no longer afford rent. One semi-fake suicide attempt later, and she is returning to Atlantic City under the legal care of her emotionally desperate mother Zelda (Annette Bening), her mother’s new “CIA agent” boyfriend George Bousche (Matt Dillon), her socially awkward brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), and Lee (Glee’s Darren Criss), a new tenant who is currently residing in her old bedroom.

The real thrust of the film is whether or not Imogene will use this down-time to take stock on her life, or simply use it check-listing everything that has gone wrong in her life and who to blame for it, and unfortunately for us, she spends too much of the film’s running time doing the latter. It also doesn’t help that Wiig is playing yet another woman with man, work and money troubles who’s forced to live with her mother again so soon after Bridesmaids, especially since this time round she’s in a comedy with little to no actual jokes in it.

The cast can’t be faulted for not trying, but unfortunately they’re all saddled with characters that simply do not exist in the real world. And while that’s all well in good in certain films, putting them into a film about a woman having a nervous breakdown and dealing with suicide threats, and placing all of this under the banner of “a funny film” is probably not the greatest of ideas.

There is some humour to be found in the darkness here – it turns out that Imogene is a dab hand at writing good suicide notes is one noteworthy running gag – but there’s not enough of it to work, and it’s far too zany to be considered as a drama. With recent dramedy Blue Jasmine showing how a “woman on the verge of nervous breakdown” film should be done, this is nothing more than Girl Most Likely To Be Watched On Netflix Five Years From Now When There’s Nothing Better On.