Review of Prime (2005) by Markb. — 03 Dec 2005

It stands to reason that the ONLY moderately amusing element of this astonishingly tedious, totally laugh- and charm-free romantic comedy from writer-director Ben Younger (whose first and only other full-length film was the perceptive business drama Boiler Room, and who here provides the dictionary illustration of the term "sophomore slump")--occurred completely by accident.

The male lead, a 23-year-old wannabe artist played by Bryan Greenberg--has the character name David Bloomberg. That also happens to be the name of the editor and head writer of Reality News Online, a website that provides extremely elaborate commentary, predictions and Monday-morning quarterbacking on every reality show on TV.

I can't blame Younger for not much about reality TV or this website, but perhaps making the protagonist a reality-obsessed maven who constantly neglects his girlfriend to watch and write about The Biggest Loser, Beauty and the Geek and/or Big Brother 32 would've vastly improved the film.

Hell, ANYTHING would have. The script flails about trying desperately to be witty, insightful, insiderish and sophisticated, but Younger's work comes off here as though he stole a Woody Allen script (not Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters, mind you, but more along the lines of Hollywood Ending or Anything Else) and then proceeded to suck out whatever grains or crumbs of wit were left.

The two normally very capable female stars are criminally shortchanged: Uma Thurman's Rafi (no relation to the hirsute children's singer), a 37-year-old divorcee who engeges in an affair with young Bloomberg, is hugely self-absorbed and unsympathetic: Thurman was a thousand times more likable when she was separating heads from bodies in the Kill Bill flicks.

And even though I normally prefer Meryl Streep in comedies over dramas precisely because films like Adaptation and Death Becomes Her truly allow the actress to cut loose and go wild, Streep comes off here as uncharacteristically constricted and boring as Bloomberg's overly protective psychiatrist mom.

As for Greenberg as Bloomberg, his major dramatic contribution is to take off his shirt, which he does so often that Prime might just become some sort of a gay cult movie on DVD provided that homosexual men have the good sense to watch it the way heterosexual ones should watch Charlie's Angels reruns and movies--with the sound turned all the way down.

As for the much-advertised gimmick of Thurman being Streep's patient without being aware for most of the length of the picture that the doctor is her lover's mom, not only (with all due respect to Roger Ebert) is this an Idiot Plot Device if ever there was one, but it yields an embarrassing, seemingly endless, dentist's drill-like dialogue exchange in which the two women discuss David's penis and I seriously debate with myself whether to shatter my all-time record of having never, never walked out on a movie I paid to see.