I Want You Back: A Bent, Funny Valentine with Charlie Day and Jenny Slate

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

What’s the opposite of “meet cute?” Meet crushed, wounded and tossed away, perhaps? 

That’s what happens in the new Amazon Original rom-com, I Want You Back, which is available worldwide on Friday, in time for Valentine’s Day.

Emma (Jenny Slate) a dentist’s receptionist, ducks into a stairwell of her office building on a Monday morning to have a good cry, where she runs into Peter (Charlie Day), a VP in a cheapskate senior’s residence operation, who is hiding out for the same reason. 

Charlie Day and Jenny Slate hatch an unlikely scheme of the heart in I Want You Back.

She has a raccoon-mask of mascara running down her face; he has a piece of toilet paper stuck to his face.

Emma has just been dumped by her handsome fitness instructor boyfriend (Scott Eastwood) for an ambitious and beautiful celebrity baker (Clark Backo). Peter’s ex, Anne (Gina Rodriguez), a middle-school teacher, was bored with his complacency and lack of big dreams, and has taken up with a hippie drama teacher.

Peter and Emma instantly bond over their shared misery, their sense of missing their chance on a future of kids and grandkids and ordinary boring happiness, so they hatch a shared plan: They’ll join forces to win their partners back by breaking up their relationships with their new partners. Meanwhile, the script signals that this is not exactly a new idea.

 “It’s like Cruel Intentions, only sexier,” crows Peter.

“How is it sexier?” Emma asks.

“It’s not,” he admits.

Like its characters, I Want You Back, is likeable but somewhat unambitious and complacent. It was written by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (a duo best known for the TV series, This Is Us, and the gay teen romance, Love Simon) and created by Jason Orley, who previously directed Pete Davidson (who has a cameo here) in Big Time Adolescence.  

What sustains it is the easy repartee of its two leads in scenes that have the easy back-and-forth of improvisation.

Neither actor qualifies as an ingenue. Day, 46, is best known as an actor-writer-producer on the long-running abrasively funny FX sitcom, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as the scratchy-voiced glue-huffing, illiterate man-child Charlie. He’s done a few movies, including the comedy, Horrible Bosses, Guillermo Del Toro’s monster movie, Pacific Rim and the dystopian drama, Hotel Artemis, where he worked with Jenny Slate. 

Slate, 39, is also mostly known for television work (Bob’s Burgers, Parks and Recreation, a season of Saturday Night Live). But she was also a stand-out in the 2014 feature, Obvious Child, aka the “abortion comedy.” And she’s warm off-beat  presence here, with an emotional musical turn as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. 

On the basis of their rapport alone, it’s a lock that the two will end up together. But first, there’s a plot to dispense with.  The plan is for Peter to befriend Emma’s ex, handsome fitness instructor, Noah (Eastwood), persuade him to break up with his new girlfriend and get back with Emma. Meanwhile, Emma’s plan is to drive Anne (Rodriguez) back to Peter by seducing her new man, Logan (Manny Jacinto). 

What doesn’t work so well is the scene structure and editing in which comic bits — a drunken night at a karaoke bar, a wild drug-fueled party, a cringy attempt at a three-way —  run on well past the point of impact.  

Also, the riches aren’t equally divided: Both Eastwood, as the genial hunk Noah, or Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) as the tentative Anne seem too one-dimensional to be worth chasing.  The one supporting character who pops out is Jacinto (NBC’s The Good Place) who comes close to stealing the picture as the gentle-talking pretentious theatre nerd.

As the 2014 Amy Poehler/Paul Rudd satire They Came Together reminded us, every rom-com is effectively a three-way between a woman, a man and a location that offers attractive tax credits. 

In this case, the locations are in Georgia — Savannah, Atlanta and especially the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, which has all the artisanal shops, parks and pretty urban squares any upwardly mobile rom-com couple could want for ordinary boring happiness.

CLICK HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Manny Jacinto.

I Want You Back. Directed by Jason Orley. Written by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger. Starring: Charlie Day, Jenny Slate, Scott Eastwood, Gina Rodriguez and Manny Jacinto. I Want You Back Is available on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, Feb. 11.