Late Night | Film Review

 

Hey Guys x

I had little interest in seeing this film when it came out in the cinema, because it just didn't seem like it would be my kind of thing, and it was only released in a few cinemas, if I remember rightly. But when it came out on Amazon Prime Video, I looked into it a bit more and thought that it might be interesting.

Late-Night talk show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) decides to hire a female writer when her views begin to decline. But will hiring naturally talented novice Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling) save Katherine's show from cancellation? 

I liked this film more than I thought I would, but I didn't love it.

From the start, everything is thrown at the audience and it all feels a bit over the top. Everything that happens, happens at 100%, and not necessarily in a good way. For example. at the start, every character is a dramatic caricature that makes them all unlikeable. 

One thing that struck me was how interesting it is as a viewer to learn about different industries - particularly because this is such a specific world that many viewers won't have experienced.

The film is centred around this show, and about how important it is that Katherine keeps her show, but the film doesn't actually do a good job of making the audience care about the show, or to an extent, the characters. It takes a little while to actually care. 

You'd expect a film about comedy to be a lot funnier, but a lot of the film is actually quite bleak. This might be representative of what working in comedy is like, but it made the film feel a bit miserable.

When the character of Katherine gets more endearing, and more human, the film starts to get a lot more enjoyable. This has to do with the fact that the personal storylines going on behind the scenes were a lot more interesting than the talk show storylines.

A lot of the lines in the film felt like they were put in to either appease or mock what's seen as 'PC' culture. I felt that some of these lines were realistic, but some of them just felt like too much, and I found myself rolling my eyes quite a lot.

The film is predictable, but because of the nature of it, there's not many routes that it can actually go down, so being predictable isn't the worst thing.

There were times in the film where information about Molly's home life was teased, but then nothing was done with any of this information. It also didn't seem like this information was used to inform her character, so why was it in there?

For me, the fundamental problem with this film is that the filmmakers tried to make a buddy-comedy (which isn't that funny), but these two characters don't particularly mesh well together. They work together like colleagues, but their 'friendship' never felt like one.

And then the ending. It felt really rushed, the 'diversity' tour that Thompson's character went on was too on-the-nose for me, and the whole One Year Later sequence felt unnecessary.

Overall, as I said, I didn't love this film, but I did like it enough to recommend it. If you need something easy to watch, or something to put on in the background, give this a try.

5.5/10  

Lou