Girl Most Likely
Girl Most Likely
Okay, I have a confession to make. One of the main reasons I saw Girl Most Likely was simply the fact that it was partially filmed in Ocean City, NJ, a town that I have visited most of my life, and I wanted to see what the town looked like on film.
Oh sure, I like Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening, Darren Criss and Matt Dillon, but if I’m being honest, I was more curious to see if Playland Castaway Cove would make the cut. (It does, briefly.)
Of course, once you sit down for the film, the scenery can only take you so far. You become involved in the characters and the storyline and the acting. So I settled in to see what the film was about and if it was good. With that in mind, I can truly say that Ocean City looks pretty darned good in Girl Most Likely.
The rest of the film doesn’t come out quite so well.
Girl Most Likely isn’t horrible and it has some interesting ideas and some extremely quirky characters. Sadly, most of them are never quite fully realized. And even when they are, they aren’t quite as clever as the filmmakers thought they might be. In fact, the sad fact is that despite giving the story an offbeat, indie gloss, most of this stuff has been done before, and it has been done better.
So while some of the specifics may be completely novel – like, for example, one character’s invention of a human-sized protective metal turtle shell which gets a surprising amount of screen time – that doesn’t necessarily make them interesting.
In fact, pretty much all of the characters and situations in Girl Most Likely are toiling so hard to be “different” and eccentric that the audience has a bit of a hard time finding a character to latch on to. Only two or three characters seem to be comfortable in their own skins, and one of those appears to be crazy, while the second seems to be an unfeeling asshole.
Distinctly not comfortable in her skin is the lead character, Imogene, played by Bridesmaids star Kristen Wiig. Imogene is a thirtyish copywriter who once upon a time, when she was a young girl growing up at the Jersey Shore, showed great promise to be a playwright. However, she has a happening New York life as a power couple with her hot live-in boyfriend and a job that offers a certain prestige, even as it squanders her talents.
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