.

She's Out of My League

Jay Baruchel, Alice Eve

Directed by Jim Field Smith
Rolling Stone: star rating
5 3
Community: star rating
5 3 0
March 11, 2010

Who can relate to a nerd who dreams of rubbing his pencil dick on the private parts of a blonde hot enough to rate a hard 10? My guess is that audience is pathetically large, which should chart She's Out of My League high as a date-movie must for the loser in all of us. OK, you've seen it before. Lots. Maybe when it was called 10 or Can't Buy Me Love or Can't Hardly Wait or Knocked Up or Superbad or anything with Michael Cera. Stop me before I name-check again. She's Out of My League is a rowdy blast because the spiky young cast treats the played-out script like virgin territory. That's acting!

Jay Baruchel, the skinny Canadian actor who scored in Tropic Thunder, is appealingly funny as Kirk Kettner, a dweeb working Pittsburgh airport security (a job Hollywood hasn't yet exhausted). When bodacious event planner Molly (a sparkling Alice Eve) wafts by Kirk, he is struck by the scent of the unattainable. Then she calls him. Don't even think that I'm telling you why.

The party spirit of this movie, directed by newcomer Jim Field Smith, comes through best when Kirk just hangs with his airport buds — chubby Devon (Nate Torrence), studly Jack (Mike Vogel) and the wild-eyed Stainer (a deadpan-hilarious T.J. Miller). Everything that happens to Kirk is fodder for their brutal comic analysis. That includes Kirk splooging in his pants at Molly's first touch and the decision to have Devon shave Kirk's pubes (how is that not gay?) because, as Jack advises, it's a look that says to Molly, "Hey, you can put your mouth there." Them's the jokes, folks, and you'll laugh more times than not because this R-rated blend of the sweet and the raunchy has its heart in the right place.

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