Movie Breakdown: Don’t Think Twice

Pre-Screening Stance:

Judging by the charming trailers and the praise I’ve seen floating around in my feeds, it seems as though Mike Birbiglia’s Don’t Think Twice is a worthy follow-up to 2012’s Sleepwalk With Me.  I’m excited.

Post-Screening Ramble:

While I wish this wasn’t the case, I didn’t much care for Don’t Think Twice.  I found it to be an uncomfortable film that’s mostly full of unlikable people, and there were numerous times throughout it where I was tempted to turn it off so that I could get out from under its umbrella of sadness.  Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not that Mike Birbiglia does a lackluster job of directing the film or that any of the performances are bad, I just simply couldn’t relate to any of it.  I’m not really a big fan of improv (the story is essentially centered around it), and all of its characters are so self-tortured that I spent the majority of the film wishing that I could step into the screen and violently shake them.  Hell, even as I write this review I’m getting pissed off just remembering even the smallest details about that obtuse lot.

Anyhow, I get what Birbiglia was aiming for – to show that being funny isn’t easy – and I think he adequately gets his point across, but the folks on display in his film are so morose that it squashed any measure of sympathy I may have been willing to conjure up for them.  Surely that wasn’t an intended side effect, yeah?

Don’t Think Twice didn’t work for me, but you may love it.

One Last Thought:

I liked seeing Keegan-Michael Key in a film where he plays a normal dude who doesn’t yell all of the time.  Granted, in Don’t Think Twice his “normal” guy is someone who routinely makes up characters who yell a lot, but I’m down to toss aside that little detail and focus on his more quiet moments in the film.